NASA’s Next Mars Rover Progresses Toward 2020 Launch

A few interesting bits in NASA’s latest release about the Mars 2020 rover:

“By adding what’s known as range trigger, we can specify where we want the parachute to open, not just at what velocity we want it to open,” said Allen Chen, Mars 2020 entry, descent and landing lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “That shrinks our landing area by nearly half.”

Cutting the landing ellipse in half is a pretty big deal—this will get that ellipse down to 10 kilometers or so. A tighter ellipse makes for a more successful robotic mission, but we’re going to have to be really precise for human missions—we’ll need to cut that range down another order of magnitude, at minimum.

As I talked about a few months ago regarding Red Dragon, supersonic retropropulsion—which SpaceX is focused on and will use for their missions (and has been working on with Falcon 9 landings)—is one of the best ways to get that precision.

Terrain-relative navigation on the new rover will use onboard analysis of downward-looking images taken during descent, matching them to a map that indicates zones designated unsafe for landing.

“As it is descending, the spacecraft can tell whether it is headed for one of the unsafe zones and divert to safe ground nearby,” said Chen. “With this capability, we can now consider landing areas with unsafe zones that previously would have disqualified the whole area. Also, we can land closer to a specific science destination, for less driving after landing.”

The more hardware we throw at Mars, the better maps we can create. The better maps we have, the better landing sites we can select. Hugely important for human missions.

There will be a suite of cameras and a microphone that will capture the never-before-seen or heard imagery and sounds of the entry, descent and landing sequence. Information from the descent cameras and microphone will provide valuable data to assist in planning future Mars landings, and make for thrilling video.

“Nobody has ever seen what a parachute looks like as it is opening in the Martian atmosphere,” said JPL’s David Gruel, assistant flight system manager for the Mars 2020 mission. “So this will provide valuable engineering information.”

I cannot wait to see what comes off those cameras.