NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully lands on Mars

PanARMENIAN.Net - NASA’s Perseverance rover has successfully touched down on the surface of Mars after surviving a blazing seven-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere, The Verge reports.

The rover’s clean landing sets the stage for a years-long journey to scour the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater for ancient signs of life.

“Touchdown confirmed,” Swati Mohan, a member of NASA’s Entry, Descent, and Landing team, said. “Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars ready to begin seeking the signs of past life.” The landing team of roughly 30 engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California jumped from their seats and cheered at the confirmation. Moments after touching down, Perseverance beamed back its first image from one of its 19 cameras.

Perseverance hit Mars’ atmosphere on time at 3:48PM ET at speeds of about 12,100 miles per hour, diving toward the surface in an infamously challenging sequence engineers call the “seven minutes of terror.” With an 11-minute comms delay between Mars and Earth, the spacecraft had to carry out its seven-minute plunge at all by itself with a wickedly complex set of pre-programmed instructions.

The on-time landing at 3:55PM ET marks NASA’s sixth successful landing on the Red Planet. The $2.7 billion rover is essentially a 2,263-pound laboratory on wheels: for the next several years, Perseverance will traverse Mars’ Jezero Crater to collect soil samples for a future retrieval mission, analyze the makeup of Martian rocks with a laser-beaming camera system, and deploy a helicopter named Ingenuity, a four-foot-on wide rotorcraft that will demonstrate the first powered flight on another planet.