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News hardware & software 18 February 2021, 22:20

author: Witold Ciemierz

Let's Watch the Landing of Perseverance Rover on Mars [UPDATED]

Perseverance, NASA's most advanced rover ever, is set to land on Mars on Thursday. Its goal will include searching for signs of life on the Red Planet. Watch the broadcast with us.

Update:

Success! Perseverance landed on Mars surface exactly at 3:55 p.m. ET. The landing procedure began when the capsule with the rover was detached from the landing module, which then entered the Red Planet's atmosphere and lowered it to the surface from a height of about 21 meters. After a journey of more than six months, Perseverance begins its Mars 2020 mission.

IN A NUTSHELL:
  1. The Perseverance rover should enter Mars' atmosphere at 3:48 p.m. ET.
  2. The manoeuvre will take about 7 minutes from that moment.
  3. You'll be able to follow the landing on NASA's official YouTube channel or the agency's website.

The journey of the Preseverance rover from our planet to Mars, which began on July 30, 2020, will end today. That's when NASA plans to conduct the landing maneuver, enabling the American rover to begin the essential part of its mission. Perseverance is to search the Red Planet for traces of life that might have once existed there. In addition to its primary task, the rover should also provide valuable information on how the biological potential of Mars is shaping up for the future.

Although this is not NASA's first Mars mission, it is unique in terms of answers it should provide. Perseverence is to achieve its goal using specialized measurement instruments, of which the most outstanding is the so-called SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals), located on the rover's robotic arm. It is a set of tools such as spectrometers, lasers and cameras, moreover, one of them is called WATSON and is expected to take detailed images of the planet's surface.

Lets Watch the Landing of Perseverance Rover on Mars [UPDATED] - picture #1
Perseverance is the most technologically advanced rover in history

NASA has chosen the Jezero crater with a diameter of about 45 kilometers, which is located at a distance of 3700 kilometers from the point where Curiosity rover landed on August 6, 2012. The area lies near the Martian equator in the northern hemisphere in a place where liquid water probably filled the crater a few billion years ago. It is this area that will witness the "seven minutes of terror", as NASA scientists call the period from the rover's entry into the planet's atmosphere until it reaches the surface. It's worth noting that due to the distance and the current position of the planets in relation to each other, the transmission will not take place completely live, because the information may reach Earth with a delay of up to 11 minutes.

This moment is undoubtedly one for the history books; it a chance to bring humanity closer to a manned expedition to Mars, and in the distant future, perhaps even to populate it. We encourage you to participate in the coverage and follow the entry, which will be updated after the landing of Perseverance.

  1. NASA Perseverance