Watch NASA mission control live as the Perseverance rover attempts to land on Mars on Thursday

Morgan McFall-Johnsen
nasa mars perseverance rover entry descent landing thumb 4x3
NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's most sophisticated Mars rover is about to attempt a plunge to the surface of Mars.

Perseverance - or "Percy," as NASA engineers have nicknamed the robot - will end its seven-month, 300-million-mile journey through space on Thursday. To brake its fall, the rover will depend on a parachute and a jetpack to help it navigate safely to a flat landing spot.

"I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that entry, descent, and landing is the most critical and most dangerous part of a mission," Allen Chen, who leads that process for Perseverance, said in a recent press briefing.

If Perseverance survives the landing - a feat accomplished by only half the spacecraft that have attempted it - its wheels will touch Martian soil at about 3:55 p.m. ET on Thursday. It's aiming for an ancient lake bed called Jezero Crater, where Perseverance will hunt for fossils of ancient alien microbes.

NASA will provide live coverage of the landing attempt from mission control, where engineers and mission managers will pace the floors and (perhaps metaphorically) bite their nails. They have a special nickname for this phase of a Mars mission: "seven minutes of terror."

Because it takes 11 minutes for signals from Perseverance to travel to Earth, nobody will know what's happened to Perseverance until about 4:06 p.m. If the rover has landed successfully, the mission control room will surely burst into cheers and applause.

You won't be able to watch the landing itself - but footage of that could become available soon after. Perseverance is set to record the first-ever video and audio of a Mars landing, and NASA has said it will make that footage available to the public.

On Thursday, however, NASA TV will air a live broadcast with commentary to explain what's happening in real time, starting at 2:15 p.m. ET. You can watch below:

A Spanish-language broadcast will begin at 2:30 p.m. ET. NASA will also provide a live feed of mission control chatter without commentary. We'll embed both of those livestreams here once they're available.

'All systems are go for landing'

Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager for the rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a briefing on Tuesday that "Perseverance is operating perfectly right now, and that all systems are go for landing."

"The spacecraft is focused, the team is focused, and we are all ready to go," she added.

nasa perseverance rover landing capsule mars entry descent landing
An illustration shows the capsule containing NASA’s Perseverance rover guiding itself towards the Martian surface as it descends through the atmosphere. NASA/JPL-Caltech

To plop down on Mars without crashing, the rover's landing apparatus must perfectly execute a series of precise, automated maneuvers.

First, the capsule carrying Perseverance has to plow through the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 mph, which superheats the material around it to up to 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. Then it must deploy a 70-foot-wide parachute, slowing its fall to about 150 mph, and drop its heat shield.

This will expose the rover's underside, giving it an open view of the ground below and allowing an onboard navigation system to identify the best landing spot. About a mile above the Martian surface, the capsule must drop the rover, which is equipped with a jetpack on its back. The jetpack's engines should fire up and fly Perseverance to its landing spot. Once there, the jetpack must slowly lower the rover on 25-foot-long nylon cords until its wheels touch the ground.

There's no room for error.

mars perseverance rover nasa landing jezero crater
An illustration of NASA's Perseverance rover landing safely on Mars. NASA/JPL-Caltech

If Perseverance lands successfully, it will spend its first few weeks on Mars checking all its systems and pinpointing any issues so that engineers on Earth can troubleshoot. Once everything is determined to be in working order, the rover will open its belly panels to release a small drone called Ingenuity. The little helicopter is set to attempt the first-ever rotocraft flights on another planet. Perseverance will attempt to record video of Ingenuity's test flights.

Then the rover will set out on its hunt for alien fossils in the cliffs and sandy plateaus of Jezero Crater.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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