NASA’s Perseverance Rover begins Mars adventure

https://twitter.com/NASAPersevere/status/1362625946549846019

Having launched in July of last year as the centrepiece of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, Perseverance travelled around 472 million kilometres over 203 days before slowing its speed and entering Martian orbit. To reach the planet itself, the mission borrowed elements of Curiosity’s infamous sky crane landing, whereby the rover is lowered by a mothership vehicle that uses rockets to gently hover down to the surface. Data cables that linked the sky crane and the rover were provided by Scottish company Gore, a long time NASA collaborator and supplier.

Mars 2020 mission gears up for a red planet return

Mars Perseverance: the technology behind the rover on a mission

Following a tense seven minutes during this stage of the descent, mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory celebrated when the rover arrived safely to its new home in the 45km-wide Jezero Crater, where it will shortly begin searching for signs that life has - at some point - existed on the Red Planet.