NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover: Here's how to watch it touch down on the Red Planet's surface live
On Thursday, February 18, NASA’s rover called Perseverance is expected to touch the surface of Mars. As per a BBC report, Perseverance makes contact with the atmosphere at 20:48 GMT (3:48 pm EST), the parachute deploys at 20:52 GMT (3:52 pm EST), powered descent begins at 20:54 GMT (3:54 pm EST), and the rover’s wheels touch down at 20:55 GMT (3:55 pm EST).
Among the probe’s cargo is a helicopter drone, Ingenuity, which will perform the first-ever controlled flight on another planet. The rover has been traveling through space since launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at the end of July. When it reaches Mars, Perseverance will have traveled 292.5 million miles on its journey from Earth.
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Here’s how to watch the event live:
The best part of this historic event is that we can watch it unfold from the comfort of our homes. The official NASA stream is on and you can watch the event unfold there. You can also check it out on NASA’s YouTube channel, along with all its other social media pages.
The rover and the mission
As per NASA, “the biggest, heaviest, cleanest, and most sophisticated six-wheeled robot ever launched into space” will search Jezero Crater -- a crater on Mars about 49 km in diameter located at 18.38°N 77.58°E in the Syrtis Major quadrangle -- for signs of ancient life and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth. As per reports, the crater is the site of an ancient lake that existed 3.9 billion years ago.
The piles of sediments reportedly are a promising place where the fossil chemical signatures of ancient Martian microbes might still be preserved today. The mission will also collect a series of rock and dirt samples to be picked up by a future mission to Mars and eventually brought back to Earth.
Ken Williford, the deputy project scientist for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission, said, “We expect the best places to look for biosignatures would be in Jezero’s lakebed or in shoreline sediments that could be encrusted with carbonate minerals, which are especially good at preserving certain kinds of fossilized life on Earth.”
"We have strong evidence that Jezero Crater once had the ingredients for life. Even if we conclude after returned sample analysis that the lake was uninhabited, we will have learned something important about the reach of life in the cosmos,” said Williford. “Whether or not Mars was ever a living planet, it’s essential to understand how rocky planets like ours form and evolve. Why did our own planet remain hospitable as Mars became a desolate wasteland?"
“The instrumentation required to definitively prove microbial life once existed on Mars is too large and complex to bring to Mars,” said Bobby Braun, the Mars Sample Return program manager. “That is why NASA is partnering with the European Space Agency on a multi-mission effort, called Mars Sample Return, to retrieve the samples Perseverance collects and bring them back to Earth for study in laboratories across the globe.”
What is Ingenuity?
Perseverance is carrying a four-pound helicopter called Ingenuity that will attempt the first controlled flight on another world in our solar system. As per reports, flying on Mars is a difficult task mostly because there is not much air there to push against to generate lift. At the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is just 1/100th as dense as Earth’s. The lesser gravity (one-third of that on Earth) helps with getting airborne.
But, as per the New York Times, taking off from the surface of Mars is the equivalent of flying through air as thin as what would be found at an altitude of 100,000 feet on Earth. No terrestrial helicopter has ever flown that high, and that’s more than twice the altitude that jetliners typically fly at.
As per NASA, a series of flight tests will be performed over a 30-Martian-day experimental window. For the very first flight, the helicopter will take off a few feet from the ground, hover in the air for about 20 to 30 seconds, and land. “That will be a major milestone: the very first powered flight in the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars,” says NASA. After that, the team will attempt additional experimental flights of incrementally farther distance and greater altitude. After the helicopter completes its technology demonstration, Perseverance will continue its scientific mission.