NASA launched Perseverance, its mission to Mars, atop an Atlas 5 rocket at 7:50 am EDT (5:20 IST) on Thursday. The goal of this mission is to search if life ever existed on the red planet. It was launched from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance. It was monitored from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
It is a $2.4 billion mission and is touted to land on the Jezero crater of Mars. This crater is believed to have been a lake over 3.5 billion years ago, and is believed to contain evidence of life that existed on Mars. Perseverance is, by far, NASA’s biggest and most technologically advanced vehicle it has ever sent to the red planet. NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover will also carry the first samples of spacesuit material ever sent to the Red Planet.
“We will get closer than ever before to answering some of science’s longest-standing questions about the Red Planet, including whether life ever arose there,” said Lori Glaze, planetary science director at NASA Headquarters.
NASA celebrated the Mars launch in style, while also shifting its outreach for the mission online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Grammy-winner Gregory Porter sang “America, the Beautiful” from his home ahead of the launch. Virginia 7th-grader Alex Mather (who named Perseverance) and Alabama 11th grader Vaneeza Rupani (who christened the rover’s helicopter Ingenuity) watched the launch in person.