Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater, which is an ancient river delta. That will be rad.) Looking for signs of ancient lifeĬuriosity landed in Gale Crater, a dried-up ancient lake bed. (Unlike Curiosity, Perseverance was able to film its landing, which the public will be able to see at a later date. Once the landing sequence started, NASA had no control over the craft. This was the most dangerous part of the whole mission, and the point at which it could have failed catastrophically. NASA/JPL-CaltechĮven though Curiosity pulled off this feat in 2012, “our hearts will still be beating hard when we get to that point of the mission,” Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for Perseverance, told reporters before the mission launched. Perseverance’s landing will be completely self-guided by its computers. It had to slow itself from around 12,000 mph to zero, all while choosing an unobstructed place to land. That means there was no piloting Perseverance in real time. Mars is far enough away from Earth that any radio signal we send the rover takes seven minutes to reach Mars. This whole feat was made more impressive by the fact that Perseverance had to land itself. When Perseverance was just above the surface, the 2,260-pound rover was lowered gently from the rocket via what NASA’s engineers call a “sky crane.” An artist’s depiction of the “sky crane” landing. (Mars’s atmosphere is thinner than Earth’s to begin with, so parachutes are less effective there.) It has to be slowed down with a powered (rocket) descent. The rover and all its gizmos are too heavy to land on the planet via parachutes alone. Upon arrival to Mars Thursday, it had to repeat an exceedingly tricky landing first achieved by Curiosity. To find out the answer to that epic question - did Mars ever have life? - first, Perseverance had to travel through space for seven months to reach the Red Planet. Even more audacious is the follow-up plan: A future mission will recover those samples from Mars and return them to Earth. It even has an experiment designed to generate oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, as a proof of concept for future rocket fuel factories on the planet.Īnd like any new piece of engineering these days, it comes with more cameras than the previous model: 23, compared to Curiosity’s 17.īut perhaps most important are the rover’s power tools: Perseverance is going to drill into an ancient river delta on Mars and collect rock samples that may contain evidence of ancient life. It has a drone helicopter aboard (called Ingenuity), which will become the first of its kind to fly on another planet (this is more of a technology demonstration than a main mission tool). It has improved autonomous driving and more resilient wheels. Like a new-model-year car, Perseverance comes with many upgrades: It can travel faster, farther, and around more obstacles on the Martian surface than Curiosity can. It’s modeled after the Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012. Perseverance’s various scientific instruments. The Perseverance rover will look familiar to many. It’s like NASA’s Curiosity Rover, but upgraded. And now, thanks to this latest mission, they have a good shot at it. This is stuff scientists dream about answering as kids. “This Mars mission is going to be the first mission to actually go and directly search for past evidence of life on Mars,” Philip Twu, a robotics engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helped design Perseverance’s autonomous driving system, told me in July. Perseverance is going to go for the next big question: Is there evidence of actual microbial life, frozen in time on the Martian surface? Previous rover missions were after one big question: Was Mars ever hospitable to life? They found that it was, with water once on the surface and organic chemicals in the environment.

Nasa mars landing