Behind the Scenes: Perseverance Rover's "Seven Minutes of Terror"

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Behind the Scenes: Perseverance Rover's "Seven Minutes of Terror" [Copy link]

Moving parts from multiple companies, including Qorvo, guided the Perseverance rover to its landing on Mars. This blog post details the spacecraft’s amazing entry, descent and landing (EDL) process and Qorvo’s role in the mission.

NASA's Perseverance 2020 Mars rover mission has the world's attention. The rover landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. According to NASA, the rover will "search for signs of ancient life and collect rock and regolith samples (broken rock and soil) to be brought back to Earth when possible." It is constantly capturing interesting images and sounds from the crater, transmitting them for all to see, and will continue to do so for the next two Earth years (one Martian year).

Many of us watched in awe as Perseverance’s entry, descent, and landing (EDL) into the crater was dubbed the “Seven Minutes of Terror.” It’s a nerve-wracking scene. When entering the Martian atmosphere, the spacecraft was traveling at 12,500 miles per hour—fast enough to vaporize. From that moment on, it had seven minutes to reach its narrow target, which meant the spacecraft had to slow to zero speed in a fraction of the time. Not only that, but the EDL was faster than a radio signal can be sent from Mars to Earth, and Perseverance guided itself through those critical minutes with the help of a rocket-powered “sky crane” from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that contained Qorvo components.

Preparing for landing

Similar to the use of Qorvo technology in the 2012 Curiosity rover landing on Mars, officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) confirmed that Mars Perseverance's critical landing radar system integrates Qorvo products, which are a component of the "sky crane" that helps the rover land.

A look inside Perseverance:

This illustration by NASA/JPL - California Institute of Technology depicts the five major components of the Mars 2020 spacecraft. From top to bottom: cruise stage, backshell, descent stage, Perseverance rover and heat shield. Each component plays a critical role in the spacecraft's journey to Mars and the thrilling entry, descent and landing. Qorvo parts are used in the descent stage assembly, also known as the "sky crane."

At takeoff, Perseverance was lifted off with its ring-shaped cruise stage. Once it entered the Martian atmosphere and began EDL, the cruise stage burned up. During this phase, Perseverance was placed in a heat shield, which allowed it to withstand temperatures of about 2,370 ℉. Then, at a predetermined distance from the target point, a parachute was deployed and the heat shield was discarded, revealing a landing radar and camera to help the spacecraft land safely.

This graphic shows the final minutes of NASA's Perseverance rover's nearly seven-month journey to Mars. To ensure the rover's safe landing on Mars on February 18, 2021, hundreds of critical events had to be executed perfectly and precisely on time.

Qorvo's experience enabling space exploration

This isn’t Qorvo’s first space race. In addition to the Perseverance and Curiosity missions, Qorvo has worked with its partners to advance planetary exploration over the past 25 years and has “launched” more than 1 million components into space. Here are a few examples:

On January 19, 2006, NASA successfully launched New Horizons to Pluto using Jupiter's gravity, and then took the spacecraft to nearly 3 billion miles beyond Pluto to explore the icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons used Qorvo technology to return the images it collected to Earth.

NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers were equipped with Qorvo GaAs amplifiers. The rovers arrived on Mars in 2004, and thanks to a combination of superior design and interplanetary devices, Spirit continued to operate and communicate with Earth until 2010. Its sister rover, Opportunity, continued to operate well until 2018, sending a wealth of data to scientists around the world.

Qorvo components played a role in the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft that landed at Saturn in 1997. The Cassini-Huygens probe contained critical equipment designed to communicate with the spacecraft during its mission on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. Qorvo's gallium arsenide (GaAs) technology was key to sending the results back to Earth.