NORFOLK, Va. (Tribune News Service) — A puddle, melted into a chair.
That’s how Henry Wright, a rover project manager at NASA Langley, described his condition after Thursday’s nail-biter touchdown of the Perseverance on Mars.
The local research center was heavily involved in the final challenge of the rover’s 6½-month journey: Getting the complex, car-sized robot on the ground in one functioning piece.
Known as EDL — for entry, descent and landing — it’s the most hazardous point of the mission, when the vehicle that’s carried the rover nearly 300 million miles transforms itself from a spacecraft into something more like a bullet, plunging toward the surface at 12,000 mph.