NASA's Perseverance rover lands on Mars to hunt for ancient life
The car-sized rover survived its descent into Jezero Crater, a dried-up lake bed where scientists hope to find traces of past microbial life.
NASA's Perseverance rover touched down safely on Mars on Thursday, surviving a nerve-wracking automated descent to begin the most ambitious search yet for signs that life once existed on the red planet.
The car-sized rover landed in Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometre-wide basin that billions of years ago held a lake and a river delta — exactly the kind of environment where microbial life, if it ever arose on Mars, might have thrived and left chemical traces in the rock.
The landing required the spacecraft to slow from around 20,000 kilometres per hour to a standstill in about seven minutes, shielded by a heat shield, slowed by a supersonic parachute and finally lowered to the surface by a rocket-powered "sky crane". Engineers at mission control erupted when confirmation of a safe touchdown arrived.
Perseverance carried a suite of instruments to study the geology and chemistry of the crater, and for the first time a mission was designed to collect and seal rock samples that a future mission would aim to return to Earth for detailed analysis. It also carried a small helicopter, Ingenuity, intended to attempt the first powered flight on another planet.
Within days the rover beamed back striking images and even sounds from the Martian surface. The mission marked a new phase in the exploration of Mars, shifting the question from whether the planet was once habitable to whether anything ever lived there.