Nasa’s Perseverance rover makes historic Mars landing
- The most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world arrives safely on the red planet after ‘seven minutes of terror’
- The six-wheeled vehicle is on a mission to determine if life once existed on Mars
Nasa’s science rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its 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 and cheers as radio signals confirmed that the six-wheeled rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zone inside Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.
The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 472 million km (293 million miles) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 19,000km/h (12,000mph) to begin its approach to touchdown on the planet’s surface.
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 space flight.
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Nasa's Perseverance rover lands on Mars
“It really is the beginning of a new era,” Nasa’s associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said earlier in the day during Nasas webcast of the event.