NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars!

11 Feb NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars!

Here at Dynamic Precision Parts Manufacturing in Illinois, we are proud to manufacture precision parts for the aerospace industry. We love knowing that in some very small way we are part of the adventure of aerospace activity and exploration. 

And you better believe that we were all watching on February 18 as Perseverance – the newest and most-advanced rover to ever reach the red planet – made its dramatic landing on Mars!

Perseverance – Percy as the NASA team running the Mars 2020 Mission call the rover – started her journey on July 20, 2020., blasting off atop an Atlas V-541 rocket from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. 

It took Perseverance about seven months to travel the 293,000,000 miles that separate Earth and Mars. The descent to the planet’s surface took seven minutes -a time period during which NASA’s scientists had no control or direct contact with the rover. (That’s because it took longer than that for the radio signal to travel the distance between Mars and Earth.)

The Mars 2020 Mission 

Perseverance landed successfully on Mars on February 18, 2021 in Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake, to begin exploring a new area of Mars. 

There are a lot of things about Perseverance’s mission that are special, including 

• Perseverance is looking for signs of ancient life, particularly in special rocks known to preserve signs of life over time. 
• For the first time, the rover will be collecting rock and soil samples that could be returned to Earth by a future NASA mission. 
• Perseverance is loaded with more cameras than any interplanetary mission in history, with 19 cameras on the rover itself and four on other parts of the spacecraft involved in entry, descent, and landing. (You can see the images on the mission’s website.)

Once Perseverance was safely on the surface of Mars, the team at Dynamic Precision Parts, which manufactures aerospace parts as well as precision machined parts for the computer, hydraulics and healthcare industries, among others, got back to work. But we will continue to follow the mission!