Nasa rover’s historic Mars landing
NASA’S Mars rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere 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 (JPL) 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, on Thursday.
The six-wheeled vehicle came to rest about 2km 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. The robotic vehicle voyaged through space for nearly seven months, covering 472 million kilometres before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 19 000km/h to begin its descent to the planet’s surface.
Moments after touchdown, Perseverance beamed back its first blackand-white images from the Martian surface, one of them showing the rover’s shadow cast on the desolate, rocky landing site.
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.
Acting Nasa chief Steve Jurczyk called it an “amazing accomplishment.
“I cannot tell you how overcome with emotion I was.”