NASA BRACES FOR `SEVEN MINUTES OF TERROR'

NASA mission control will be on tenterhooks Thursday as its Perseverance rover attempts the most treacherous landing yet on Mars.

Perseverance will streak across the Martian sky at 12,000 m.p.h. — more than six times as fast as speeding bullet — before slowing itself with a 70-foot-wide parachute, and setting down in a crater.

If all goes according to plan, the car-sized rover will reach the surface around 4 p.m. ET It will be the culmination of the $2.7 billion

Mars 2020 mission, in which the rover took seven months to complete the 293 million mile journey.

The entry, descent and landing phase is known as the “seven minutes of terror.” Scientists won't know what's happening in real time because it takes so long for signals to reach Earth.

Mars has become known as the Bermuda Triangle of space exploration because more than half of missions sent there have failed. Scientists fear the violence of Perseverance's parachute opening risks shredding it. On the descent, a heat shield will fall away to release a jet-propelled “sky crane” that lowers the rover to the surface.

If it lands successfully, Perseverance will drill out rock samples and store them in cigar-shaped tubes. NASA ultimately hopes to bring the samples back to Earth on a later mission in the 2030s.

Lori Glaze, a NASA scientist said: “We're going to be able to watch ourselves land for the first time on another planet.”