The NASA team working on the Perseverance mission will give its next update at 5:30 p.m. ET today. We will hear from them again Friday at 1 p.m. and Monday at 2 p.m.
We will likely see more images and learn other cool insights the rover has gathered so far. Any information like this will help the rover teams plot out Perseverance’s journey through Jezero Crater now that they know exactly where she landed.
While Perseverance is very autonomous, it still needs to talk to teams on Earth before driving on Mars, shooting lasers at rocks or collecting samples.
These teams, with members spread across the globe, will transition to “Mars time,” beginning their days about 2 p.m. local time on Mars. For many, especially those at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this means getting up later in the day and working into the night.
NASA’s Perseverance rover just landed on Mars after leaving Earth more than six months ago.
Now that the rover is on the Red Planet, the work begins.
Here’s what it will do:
Perseverance, NASA’s most sophisticated rover to date, just landed on Mars.
The moment was a culmination of years of preparation for NASA scientists across the country.
Watch the moment inside the NASA control center in Pasadena, California:
Retired NASA astronaut Ron Garan said the Perseverance rover landing on Mars is significant because “these are the baby steps of exploring our whole solar system.”
“Really everything we do in space directly benefits life on Earth,” Garan told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin.
“It directly benefits our ability to survive all the crises that might come at us, whether that’s super volcanic eruptions, global warming. Whatever the case is, a better understanding of how planetary science works, how planets function, and the life cycle of planets is going to help us here on Earth immensely. And it’s also going to help us understand our place in the universe,” he said.
Garan said the rover looking into why there isn’t life on Mars now is just as important as looking for signs of life.
“Imagine if we see evidence that there was once life on Mars. I mean, that would be amazing in itself. But to me, the other part of that is, we’d want to know why there’s not life there now. We would want to know why a planet that used to have water and used to potentially be able to support life no longer does. And that has incredible implications for our own climate study here on Earth,” Garan said.
Just minutes after landing on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover beamed back this image to Earth. It is the first of many the rover will send while it’s on its mission on the planet.
So, Perseverance isn’t actually tweeting from Mars, per se, but humans back at NASA are.
Here’s what the account tweeted shortly after landing:
The Perseverance rover just became NASA’s fifth rover to safely land on the surface of Mars after surviving the “seven minutes of terror.”
This is the most sophisticated rover the agency has ever sent to the Red Planet. It will gather data and look for signs of ancient life in a crater that once contained a lake about 3.9 billion years ago.
Perseverance’s parachute has just deployed, and it has slowed its speed. It’s very close to the surface.
Perseverance has just started what NASA refers to as the “seven minutes of terror.” This is when the rover essentially has to land itself on Mars with no help from NASA, due to a one-way 11 minute time-delay.
The ground teams tell the spacecraft when to begin EDL (entry, descent and landing) and the spacecraft takes over from there — and mission control begins an agonizing wait.
The spacecraft hits the top of the Martian atmosphere moving at 12,000 miles per hour and has to slow down to zero miles per hour seven minutes later when the rover softly lands on the surface.
Here’s a look at what happens during the final moments:
The cruise stage of Perseverance’s journey has ended, and it has arrived at the Red Planet. This means the spacecraft will need to slam on the brakes to slow down from a speed of around 12,000 miles per hour.
Entry, descent and landing will begin soon.
The Perseverance rover is sending “heartbeat tones” back to Earth to tell NASA’s team it’s healthy. However, it is now operating on its own millions of miles away.
It takes 11 minutes for the rover to send data from Mars back to Earth. In real rover time now, Perseverance is on its own and beginning its entry. However, we won’t receive that data for a few more minutes.
Those voices you hear calling out the progress of the mission belong to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Swati Mohan and Allen Chen.
Chen is the Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing lead at JPL and Mohan is a guidance navigation control engineer.
Both have worked tirelessly on the mission, which all leads up to this big moment: landing on Mars.
The cruise stage of Perseverance’s journey is nearing its end, meaning it’s close to arriving at the Red Planet.
Once the rover begins its entry, we will start a phase called the “seven minutes of terror” in which it descends to the surface of Mars.
The Perseverance rover’s journey from Earth to Mars started in July, when the spacecraft carrying the rover and helicopter launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
But on the other side of the country, the area around the control room in California was also dealing with an earthquake.
The control center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California experienced some earthquake activity on July 30 ahead of the launch, but it did not impact the launch.
The Mars 2020 mission launch came after nearly a decade of planning by thousands of engineers, scientists and specialists at NASA centers across the country and their commercial partners.
During the final stages of mission preparation, teams also had to manage the difficulties of the coronavirus pandemic.
A reminder from mission control: NASA could lose contact with the rover, but it could still land safely even if that happens because the rover is in control of its landing.
NASA engineers refer to the“ seven minutes of terror” when landing on Mars because the rover essentially lands itself — and NASA can’t do anything to help if something goes wrong because of a one-way 11-minute time delay.
The Perseverance is set to land on Mars in less than an hour, at 3:55 p.m. ET.
The Perseverance rover will land in a spot that has never been attempted by NASA: Jezero Crater.
The crater is incredibly intriguing to scientists because it’s possible that life may have existed in an ancient lake that filled the crater 3.9 billion years ago. But it’s also a dangerous site full of hazards — especially when thinking about landing an SUV-size rover on the Martian surface.
While Mars may look like one big red frozen desert from space, the surface is incredibly varied and dotted with craters, canyons, mountains, glaciers and features that speak of its ancient past.
The 28-mile-wide ancient lake bed and river delta, the most challenging site yet for a NASA spacecraft landing on Mars. Rather than being flat and smooth, the small landing site is littered with sand dunes, steep cliffs, boulders and small craters.
NASA engineers refer to the“ seven minutes of terror” when landing on Mars because the rover essentially lands itself — and NASA can’t do anything to help if something goes wrong because of a one-way 11-minute time delay.
It takes seven minutes for the rover, which enters the Martian atmosphere moving at 12,000 miles per hour, to hurtle down to the surface. Parachutes and retrorockets help slow it down to zero mph for a hopefully safe and soft landing.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most critical and dangerous part of the mission, according to Allen Chen, Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The mission teams, however, have done everything they can to prepare for a successful landing.
NASA’s MAVEN and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiters are ready to support Perseverance’s entry, descent and landing. The two satellites will help relay communication to Earth from the rover as it lands.
Remember: There will be about an 11-minute delay while that information travels from Mars to Earth.
NASA teams have just confirmed that Perseverance is ready to execute entry, descent and landing on its own. They have now turned off the transmitter, which brings us one step closer to the highly anticipated landing.
The Perseverance rover is nearing the end of its nearly 300-million-mile journey, according to an update by Swati Mohan, the guidance navigation control engineer who has worked on the mission for eight years.
It’s traveling at a speed of about 12,000 miles per hours. In less than 2 hours, it will begin the descent to its destination on Mars’ surface.
This is the first — and most sophisticated — rover NASA has sent to Mars in nine years.
Multiple cameras on Perseverance will record the rover’s landing on Mars today — but don’t expect to see live footage of it today.
It takes time for the rover to transmit images back to Earth: If all goes according to plan today, in weeks the cameras and microphones on the spacecraft will show the rover’s perspective for the first time.
There are 23 cameras, including those with color, zoom and video capability, and two microphones to capture the rover’s landing on Mars, its exploration of the planet and the flights of the helicopter. The Ingenuity helicopter, which is also traveling to Mars with the rover, carries two cameras as well.
Mission Control may look a little different for today’s landing than previous ones, like Curiosity in 2012 (remember “MohawkGuy”? He’s excited about this landing too).
NASA is taking the pandemic very seriously, so the teams in the control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be wearing masks, observing social distancing and using dividers — and there will be less people in “the room where it happens” (who says you can’t mix in some “Hamilton” references with space).
But if the landing is successful, you better believe they will still celebrate.
As for the rest of the folks who would normally be at JPL on such a historic day — they’ll be watching from home, just like the rest of us.
If it seems like Mars is a popular destination for spacecraft lately, that’s for a reason.
Multiple missions, including Perseverance as well as the United Arab Emirates’s Hope Probe and China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched in July and set a course for Mars.
They all launched when Earth and Mars were in alignment on the same side of the sun, which happens about every two years, and makes for a much more efficient six- to seven-month journey to Mars.
Hope is expected to just orbit the planet. Tianwen-1 began orbiting Mars last week and it is expected to land on the planet’s surface in May or June.
You may see peanuts sitting around Mission Control in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory today.
That’s intentional: Some engineers at NASA think it’s good luck to have them on hand, as they’ve been present during previous successful landings.
Perseverance isn’t traveling to Mars by itself. Along for the ride is Ingenuity, which will be the first helicopter to fly on another planet.
After landing, the rover will also find a nice, flat surface to drop the Ingenuity helicopter so it has a place to use as a helipad for its potential five test flights during a 30-day period. This will occur within the first 50 to 90 sols — or Martian days — of the mission.
Once Ingenuity is settled on the surface, Perseverance will drive to a safe spot at a distance and use its cameras to watch Ingenuity’s flight. Ingenuity also carries two cameras.
Ingenuity weighs only four pounds and features four carbon-fiber blades, solar cells and batteries.
Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, so the design for Ingenuity had to be lightweight, while including larger and faster rotors than those of typical helicopters on Earth to get it up in the air.
If Ingenuity is successful, it could pave the way for more advanced robotic aircraft to be used on future missions to Mars, both robotic and human, according to NASA.
The helicopter’s name was submitted by high school student Vaneeza Rupani of Northport, Alabama, during a contest to name the aircraft and selected by NASA.
Perseverance is set to land on Mars later today. The rover was originally known as the Mars 2020 mission — but it got its name in a nationwide contest, won by Alexander Mather, a seventh grade student in Virginia.
When Mather was 11, his parents sent him to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. He saw the capsule of the Saturn V rocket rising over the building in 2018 and lost his mind, Mather said.
“I immediately knew space was something I was doing for the rest of my life,” he said.
Mather wants to get a degree in engineering or science and hopes to work at NASA as an engineer.
In his essay, 13-year-old Mather wrote:
The name was announced by Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate’s associate administrator.
“Alex’s entry captured the spirit of exploration,” said Zurbuchen. “Like every exploration mission before, our rover is going to face challenges, and it’s going to make amazing discoveries. It’s already surmounted many obstacles to get us to the point where we are today — processing for launch. Alex and his classmates are the Artemis Generation, and they’re going to be taking the next steps into space that lead to Mars. That inspiring work will always require perseverance. We can’t wait to see that nameplate on Mars.”
Students have helped name Mars rovers since Sojourner in 1997, followed by Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity.
“This was a chance to help the agency that put humans on the Moon and will soon do it again,” said Mather. “This Mars rover will help pave the way for human presence there, and I wanted to try and help in any way I could. Refusal of the challenge was not an option.”
Perseverance’s two-year mission will begin once it lands on Mars. The rover will search for evidence of ancient life and study Mars’ climate and geology and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth by the 2030s.
For that reason, Perseverance is also the cleanest machine ever sent to Mars, designed so it doesn’t contaminate the Martian samples with any microbes from Earth that could provide a false reading.
Below is a look at Perseverance in 2019 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
The rover — still known as the Mars 2020 rover at the time — was kept in the “clean room” while engineers and mission teams worked on various components and tasks to prepare it for shipping off to Cape Canaveral for launch. In the photo, they’re wearing head-to-toe “bunny suits” to keep the rover from being contaminated.
Perseverance, NASA’s most sophisticated rover to date, is expected to land on the surface of Mars today around 3:55 p.m. ET.
The rover has been traveling through space since launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at the end of July. When it reaches Mars, Perseverance will have traveled 292.5 million miles on its journey from Earth.
Perseverance is NASA’s first mission that will search for signs of ancient life on another planet to help answer the big question: Was life ever present on Mars? The rover will explore Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake that existed 3.9 billion years ago, and search for microfossils in the rocks and soil there.
Along for the ride with Perseverance is an experiment to fly a helicopter, called Ingenuity, on another planet for the first time.
NASA only lands a rover on Mars about every 10 years — the last was Curiosity in 2012. The Curiosity rover is still going strong: It has been more than 3,000 Martian days since it touched down on the red planet.
