NASA’s Perseverance rover has safely landed on Mars after its 292.5 million-mile journey from Earth, the agency confirmed.
The rover sent back its first images of the landing site immediately after landing.
Hello, world. My first look at my forever home. #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/dkM9jE9I6X
— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 18, 2021
The rover has been on a nearly 300 million-mile journey since it left Earth more than 6 months ago.
The Perseverance mission is groundbreaking, as it is full of firsts: The search for signs of ancient life on Mars, the first helicopter fly on another planet, the first recordings of sound on the red planet.
NASA’s most sophisticated rover to date has a packed agenda for the next few years.
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.
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Follow-up missions will return samples of this site collected by Perseverance to Earth by the 2030s.
Perseverance is NASA’s ninth landing on Mars and the agency’s fifth rover. In order to land, it had to go through the infamous “seven minutes of terror.”
The one-way time it takes for radio signals to travel from Earth to Mars is about 11 minutes, which means the seven minutes it takes for the spacecraft to land on Mars occurs without any help or intervention from NASA teams on Earth.
This rover is the heaviest NASA has ever attempted to land, weighing in at over a metric ton.
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