Mars rover Perseverance has successfully landed on the surface of Mars. At around 9:45 PM, the robot car of the American space agency NASA landed on the red planet.
NASA scientists celebrate the successful landing:
Due to its great distance from Mars, NASA did not receive notice of the successful landing until 11 minutes and 22 seconds later, after which scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California congratulated each other. “Touchdown is confirmedShortly after, the rover shared a first black and white image of the surface of Mars.
Beforehand, NASA scientists were particularly concerned about the seven minutes between entering the atmosphere of Mars and the actual landing. In other words, the ‘seven minutes of terror’ as they are described with some sense of drama, because everything can go wrong on paper in that phase.
For example, about sixty explosive bolts had to go off at the right time and in the right order and the vehicle was flown to the landing site in the crater Jezero via a kind of flying crane.
But just like with Perseverance’s predecessor Curiosity, which has been touring the planet since 2012, it went smoothly.
This is how the landing went:
Perseverance was launched last July from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The robot car weighing about 1000 kilos is stuffed with numerous measuring instruments and cameras. The rover also has a bur that can take soil samples and put them in tubes ready for transport to Earth.
Ultimately, with the soil samples, scientists hope to better understand what conditions were like on Mars billions of years ago, when the planet had an even denser atmosphere and water flowed.
The mission of Perseverance, which costs over 2 billion euros, is of great importance to NASA, which in recent years has focused on Mars research and manned missions far into space.
In this NOS animation you can see how Perseverance will collect soil and stone samples, which a European rover must retrieve later: