The rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, lifting away from Earth on Thursday July 30, 2020, at 7:50 a.m. EDT hurtling towards the Red Planet carrying the Perseverance rover, humanity’s most sophisticated rover yet. After riding along for the 292.5-million-mile journey to Mars and preparing to land came “seven minutes of terror.”

During these seven minutes of the landing procedure the NASA team is on the edge of the seat because the spacecraft is on its own. Due to the time it takes radio signals to travel to Mars the team has no control during the landing.

Perseverance touched the surface of Mars on Thursday February 18, 2021, at 3:55 p.m. EDT landing flawlessly! Perseverance spent its first several weeks on the planet conducting systems tests. During the testing phase, Perseverance supported the accompanying Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, including a series of flight tests.

On June 1 it began its first science campaign to explore and survey some of the oldest geologic features of the Jezero Crater. “We are putting the rover’s commissioning phase as well as the landing site in our rearview mirror and hitting the road,” said Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance Project Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The six-wheeled Perseverance rover is about 10 feet long, 9 feet wide, and 7 feet tall, and weighs 2,260 pounds on Earth – about the size of a car. Yet it packs a whole lot more than the average car.

This deluxe car carries seven instruments for collecting scientific data from the surface of the planet, including panoramic photos, chemical composition analysis, mineralogy, and detect organic compounds. determine the fine-scale elemental composition, measurements of temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, relative humidity, and dust size and shape, and the geologic structure of the subsurface.

These instruments are included to support four mission goals: determine whether microbial life ever existed, characterize the climate, characterize the geology, and prepare for human exploration. This will include the collection, analysis, and preservation of atmospheric and terrestrial samples.

Supporting the mission goal to search for microbial life are four objectives, including:

Finding rocks formed or changed by environments that may have supported ancient microbial life on Mars.

Locating rocks capable of preserving biosignatures (chemical traces) of ancient life.

Drilling core samples from roughly 30 locations on the Martian surface to determined likely sites for finding ancient life.

Testing a device which frees oxygen from Mars’ heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere, a technology which could support future Mars missions that include humans.

The prospects of this mission are extremely exciting.  Scientists have spent decades attempting to identify if life existed on Mars, and they expect to find the answer with Perseverance. In addition, Perseverance should be able to identify if humanity will be able to eventually and permanently settle on Mars.