NASA's InSight Mars lander may 'hear' Perseverance rover's landing next month - Space.com

The landing of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover next month will make serious waves, some of which may help scientists better understand the Red Planet's structure.

Perseverance, the centerpiece of NASA's $2.7 billion life-hunting, sample-caching Mars 2020 mission, is scheduled to touch down inside the 28-mile-wide (45 km) Jezero Crater on Feb.

The epic landing will generate seismic signals that one of the rover's cousins, NASA's InSight Mars lander, will try to detect from more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away, a new study reports.

If that happens, it will be a spaceflight first: No spacecraft has ever "heard" such a landing on another planet in this way, InSight team members said.

In photos: NASA's Mars Perseverance rover mission to the Red Planet.

"Unlike on Earth, where you can independently figure out when and where a [seismic] source happened, and of course how big it was, on Mars, we've got a single station, and we're both trying to identify the mechanics of the source and the structure of the planet that the waves propagated through," study lead author and InSight team member Ben Fernando, a Ph.D.

Perseverance's landing therefore represents a great opportunity for InSight scientists — a chance to collect seismic data generated by an impact, the details of which are known in advance, Fernando and his colleagues wrote in the new study.

Mars 2020 will employ the same entry, descent and landing (EDL) strategy that got its predecessor, the Curiosity Mars rover, down safely in August 2012. .

But this signal won't be strong enough to be picked up by InSight, which sits about 2,145 miles (3,452 km) from Perseverance's landing site, Fernando and his team calculated, citing the dissipating effect of Martian winds as a key factor.

It's unclear how strong the seismic waves from the CMBD impacts will be; InSight has not yet detected any confirmed impacts on Mars, so predictions are difficult.

But Fernando and his team generated estimates based on data gathered here on Earth and on the moon, and those numbers suggest that InSight has a decent chance of measuring the waves.

There's some luck involved in this relatively rosy figure: The CMBD-generated waves will arrive at InSight's location in early evening Elysium Planitia time, the quietest part of the day, Fernando said.

The InSight team would love to listen out for the Tianwen-1 landing, Fernando said.

InSight almost certainly won't be able to detect seismic signals from that landing sequence, given that the ExoMars duo will touch down on the other side of the planet from InSight, Fernando said!