Click here to watch the live stream of NASA's Perseverance Rover landing on Mars. The purpose of this mission is to "seek signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) for possible return to Earth."
Watch an epic journey unfold on Thursday, Feb. 18 as our Perseverance rover lands on Mars. To reach the surface of the Red Planet, the rover has to survive the harrowing final phase known as Entry, Descent, and Landing.
Only then can the rover – the biggest, heaviest, cleanest, and most sophisticated six-wheeled robot ever launched into space – search Jezero Crater for signs of ancient life and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth.
Tune in to a live video feed of key landing activities and commentary from Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Perseverance will be landing at the Jezero Crater on the Red Planet which you can see below in relation to the other landing sites used previously.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
One of the coolest parts about the Perseverance Rover is the helicopter that went along for the ride. The helicopter, named Ingenuity, is going along to (hopefully) be the first powered flight on Mars! In fact, that would be the first powered flight on another planet. The plan is for any commands to be sent to the helicopter before the flight, then it would do the flight on its own, not being controlled by a human during the flight. The Mars atmosphere is only 1% as dense as Earth's atmosphere. That makes it more difficult to generate lift needed for the helicopter to fly. The engineers who designed the helicopter had to make everything on board smaller and lighter to give it the best chance of getting off the ground.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The image above shows what will happen in the minutes leading up to the landing. Perseverance will spend at least a full Martian year (roughly two Earth years) on the planet. If you think today was cold in Kentuckiana, the high temperature today on Mars was 3 degrees.
