’Touchdown Confirmed!’ NASA Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Lands on the Red Planet

NASA successfully landed its largest and most sophisticated science rover on Mars, as the spacecraft Perseverance touched down in an ancient river delta that may contain signs of whether the planet ever harbored microbial life. Cheers erupted at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which oversees the agency’s rover fleet, when flight controllers received a signal Thursday at 3:55 p.m. Eastern that the rover had touched down. Perseverance had traveled 292 million miles (470 million kilometers) since launching July 30 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Mars landings are among the toughest challenges in space exploration, and Perseverance’s arrival in Jezero Crater was the trickiest NASA has ever attempted. Strewn by boulders and featuring sand dunes and cliffs as high as 300 feet (about 90 meters), the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) crater had been rejected for previous missions. NASA targeted it after advances in terrain-navigation technology enabled the craft to alter its flight pa