On February 18 – that is, today – NASA's new Perseverance rover will attempt to descend into the atmosphere of the planet Mars in the hope of landing safely.
Viewers on Earth can watch the Perseverance landing on Live Science, NASA TV or the website , which will broadcast the event live from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The broadcast begins on February 18 at 2:15 p.m. EST. There will also be several briefings leading up to the landing day. The exact schedule is available on the Perseverance mission website.
The rover will search Jezero Crater for signs of microbial life. The 28-mile-wide crater was once a river delta and lake, a wet environment that could have supported life on Mars in the past. If all goes as planned, Perseverance will be the first Mars rover to collect samples that will be returned to Earth. Future missions by NASA and the European Space Agency will bring back rocks from Mars.
Perseverance's mission to Mars will last at least one Martian year, or 687 Earth days. However, Mars rovers can exceed their planned missions. NASA's Curiosity rover, launched in 2011, was originally intended for a two-year mission, but is still orbiting the Red Planet more than eight years after landing, and the Spirit rover has been roaming for six years despite a planned mission duration of only 92 days.
Perseverance is equipped with advanced cameras and instruments capable of analyzing the composition of a rock based on the type of X-rays it emits after being subjected to a high-energy X-ray beam. It has ground-penetrating radar to image the planet's subsurface and a drill to collect samples from below the surface. The rover will also test whether humans could survive on Mars by converting carbon dioxide into oxygen in an experiment called the "Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment."
Source of information: livescience.com
