Nasa rover makes smooth landing on Mars, beams back first images
Nasa’s Mars rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely inside a vast crater, the first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.
Mission managers at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles burst into applause, cheers and fist-bumps as radio beacons signalled that the rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived as planned on the floor of Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.
The six-wheeled vehicle came to rest about 2 kilometres from towering cliffs at the foot of a remnant fan-shaped river delta etched into a corner of the crater billions of years ago and considered a prime spot for geo-biological study on Mars.
“Touchdown confirmed,” Swati Mohan, the lead guidance and operations specialist announced from the control room. “Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars.”
The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 472 million kilometres before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 19,000 kilometres per hour to begin its descent to the planet’s surface.
Because it takes radio waves 11 minutes to travel from Mars to Earth, the SUV-sized rover had already reached Martian soil by the time its arrival was confirmed by signals relayed to Earth from one of several satellites orbiting Mars.
The spacecraft’s self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of manoeuvres that NASA dubbed “the seven minutes of terror” stands as the
most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.
Scientists hope to find biosignatures embedded in samples of ancient sediments that Perseverance
is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth - the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from another planet.