NASA’S Perseverance Rover Officially Lands on Mars

NASA has successfully landed its Perseverance rover on Mars to search for signs of life.

The Perseverance Rover Landing Perseverance will touch down on Mars on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, at approximately 12:30 p.m. PST (3:30 p.m. EST). (Image courtesy of NASA.)

The Perseverance rover has touched down on Mars on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, at approximately 4:00 p.m. EST. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

NASA’s largest rover to touch down on another planet, Perseverance, has landed on Mars’ Jezero Crater following a 203-day journey.

Since Mars and Earth are the closest every 26 months, there is only a small window to launch the mission. What many call the seven minutes of terror for the rover to land is now over. The autonomous platform gently lowered the rover to the ground at around 3:55 p.m. EST using the preprogrammed landing instructions and a sky crane maneuver.

The mission controllers stopped sending commands to the spacecraft and left Perseverance to complete the landing sequence at 3:48 p.m EST. This is when the spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere at about 19,500 kph. The spacecraft heated up to 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit due to the friction from the atmosphere. It then deployed its parachute, detached its protective heat shield and used its Terrain-Relative Navigation to find a landing spot. The parachute separated from the rover while the jetpack and retrorockets slowed down landing at its final descent stage. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution are relaying detailed data to NASA’s Deep Space Network. 

You can watch the full launch on NASA’s YouTube channel: 

A postlanding briefing will start at 5:30 p.m. EST on NASA TV and YouTube.

The mission was launched on July 30, 2020, to obtain samples from Mars. The 2,263-pound vehicle has improved precision for landing as well as better wheels for different terrains. It will spend two years investigating the crater and search for signs of ancient microbial life. The crater is located north of the Martian equator and was home to a river delta, which was filled with water 3.5 billion years ago.

A step-up from the Curiosity rover, Perseverance’s suite of seven onboard instruments will be geared toward finding evidence of actual past life. The Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator provides electricity to the rover. It is also equipped with multiple cameras such as the Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable science cameras, and the SuperCam, which uses a pulsed laser and microphone to understand the chemistry of the samples. Using the Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing Instrumentation 2 sensor suite and the Terrain-Relative Navigation system, the rover will collect data and guide the spacecraft. This suite includes the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals instruments, and Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering imager.

The rover chassis also features more instruments to gather data on the surface of Mars including the Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment, which determines the different layers of the planet’s surface and how they formed over time. The rover’s Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer instrument will provide information on the planet’s weather and environment as well as the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment technology will provide oxygen.

Accompanied by NASA’s Ingenuity, the four-pound helicopter will perform short flights and take aerial images to explore caves or areas that the rover cannot access. The helicopter will deploy from the belly of Perseverance following one or two months of testing.

“This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally –… we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk.