‘Perseverance’ goes the distance

An illustration of the sequence of events during the seven minutes it will take for Nasa’s Perseverance rover to descend to the Martian surface today. Inset: An illustration of the rover on Mars.

The rover, the most advanced robotic astrobiology lab flown to another world, is near the end of its sevenmonth, 470 million km journey, last night on target for a landing attempt on the red planet.

Its touchdown is set for 9.55am today (NZ time) in a vast basin called Jezero Crater, site of a longvanished Martian lake bed.

Mission managers at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, near Los Angeles, yesterday said they were hopeful the SUVsized rover would arrive safely.

The objective of the twoyear mission is to search for signs of microbial organisms that may have flourished on Mars some 3 billion years ago, when the planet was warmer and wetter.

The rover is designed to extract rock samples for analysis back on Earth — the first such specimens collected from another planet.