Members of NASA’s Perseverance rover team react in mission control after receiving confirmation the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars on Feb. 18 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (NASA)

By Glenn Hicks

deep space

Saskatchewan soaks up inspiration from Mars landing

Feb 18, 2021 | 6:13 PM

NASA has successfully placed the world’s – and the known universe’s – most expensive six-wheeled vehicle on Mars, after a nerve-wracking entry, descent and landing of the Perseverance Rover on Thursday.

Given humanity’s absorption with the COVID-19 pandemic, the live-streamed event provided a much-needed distraction and some fascination for those around the world who watched the tension-filled final minutes of the Perseverance rover’s seven-month trip to the red plant. The total mission cost is around $2.7 billion.

Scientists hope the vehicle’s exploits in the coming years along with a future mission to return geological samples to Earth, will provide key answers about past life on Mars and, potentially, provide a better understanding of our own planet’s future.

Saskatchewan watches

Viewers across north central Saskatchewan were among the millions who watched NASA mission control talk viewers through the tension-filled ‘seven minutes of terror’ as the lander entered the Martian atmosphere at around 20,000 km/h, deployed its huge parachute, and then softly guided itself to a landing spot below a thruster-driven sky crane.

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La Ronge high school teacher Colin Weinberger enjoyed watching the drama of the Mars landing unfold (Submitted photo/Colin Weinberger)

“It was pretty exciting,” Colin Weinberger, a math and physics teacher at Churchill Community High School in La Ronge told paNOW from his home after watching the coverage of the exceptional effort by the scientific team behind the mission.

“All these people are incredibly brilliant and it was just coordinated brilliantly,” he said.

The teacher

Weinberger teaches an astronomy course and says his students – many of whom he expected also watched the landing – share the same questions.

“Are there aliens, is there life, how much do we know? Things like Perseverance can start answering some of those questions. It’s an exciting time for [the students], that’s for sure.”

Weinberger’s own interest in physics was prompted by the shuttle and International Space Station missions and figures a new generation of science lovers can be inspired by events like Thursday’s.

“If students have the inkling, events like this always push them forward,” he said.

Young minds

On the younger end of the student scale, a family in Prince Albert settled in front of their computer monitor to watch events unfold.

“I thought it was important for the kids to see to show them that it takes a lot of practice and work to achieve the things you want,” Roger Boucher said, who watched the spectacle at home with his kids; Isla, 8 and Hugo, 5.

A young P.A. family watches the Perseverance rover entry, descent and landing on Mars on the NASA livestream (Submitted photo/Roger Boucher)

Boucher admitted the NASA coverage, which involved lots of talking heads, didn’t really engage his young kids but they got interested when they talked about sending people to Mars, and discussed the time it took Perseverance to actually reach its destination.

He added, “ …with so much space and Sci-Fi in movies it just seemed normal to them.”

Indeed, NASA’s continued success rate of landing a mobile lab (this one weighing a tonne) after a 472-million kilometre journey, as well as the repeated endeavours of SpaceX and their reusable rockets, has created a sense that space exploration is becoming more normal. But it remains incredibly difficult.

Amazing science

“You’re dealing with a tonne of moving parts, literally. The Earth is moving and Mars is moving …and trying to make all the math and engineering line up so that you do everything perfectly,” Dr. Tanya Harrison, a planetary scientist who specializes in Mars explained. “Even though we make it seem easy now because we’ve had a lot of successes…we should never be complacent.”

Harrison, who is currently based in Washington, D.C., has worked on the previous Opportunity and Curiosity rovers sent to Mars as well as Perseverance and said the mission to ultimately get geological samples back to Earth will allow for DNA sampling – if they find any.

“That will tell us so much about life in the solar system… and teach us about how Mars has changed. To go from this planet that used to be warm and wet and have rivers and lakes to a cold polar desert we see today.”

The hope is such a study can help understand how Earth could yet evolve.

Perseverance Rover’s First Image from Mars: This is the first image NASA’s Perseverance rover sent back after touching down on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. The view, from one of Perseverance’s Hazard Cameras, is partially obscured by a dust cover. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Aside from the future discoveries awaiting Perseverance and the NASA team, Harrison figures the images of the successful arrival on the red planet Thursday can inspire a new generation to get involved.

“Just looking around at the folks that have worked on missions with me that are the same age, a lot of us were inspired by previous missions and ended up working on them. I think it will inspire kids not just to be interested in Mars, but maybe in technology, engineering and science in general… and take that excitement in any direction: it could be airplanes, designing cars, or making technology to battle climate change. You never know where it’s going to go.”

Editor’s note: this story was amended to make clear the 472 million kilometres Perseverance travelled was the length of its journey, not the actual distance between Earth and Mars. That can vary between around 54.6 million kilometres at its closest to around 400 million kilometres at its furthest.

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glenn.hicks@jpbg.ca

On Twitter:@princealbertnow