After traveling nearly 300 million miles and surviving a heart-stopping 7-minute descent to the surface of Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is preparing to get down to the real science – looking for signs of ancient life on the red planet.
On Thursday, Perseverance shed its “cruise stage” and began a blistering 12,000 mph drop to the Martian surface.
To cheers of joy at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where the mission is being managed, “Percy” landed in Jezero Crater, a feature on the Martian surface that bears unmistakable signs of having been filled with liquid water in the planet’s distant past. Scientists hope Perseverance will collect evidence that microscopic organisms once lived there.
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