NASA’s Perseverance rover made its historic landing on the red planet on Thursday as it hurtled headfirst onto the surface of Mars. The rover is the most advanced astrobiology lab ever flown to another world and was headed for a self-guided touchdown inside a vast, rocky basin called Jezero Crater at the edge of a remnant river delta carved into the red planet billions of years ago.
“It’s full of the stuff that scientists want to see but stuff that I don’t want to land on,” Al Chen, head of JPL’s descent and landing team, told reporters on Wednesday. Getting Perseverance to its destination in one piece after its 293-million-mile journey, he added, is far from assured.
According to space.com, this mission has been a decade in the making, which is why various officials from NASA expressed a lot of excitement and trepidation in a press conference held on Wednesday, February 17. A greater and better understanding of Perseverance comes after putting it in context with the 50 or so years of NASA’s Mars missions that came before. The groundwork for this life-seeking mission began with exploring signs of water from orbit, landing a few missions, and then sending out the first rovers in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The Commune has already covered an extensive explainer about the Perseverance mission to Mars and its significance, which you can find here.
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