Mars Perseverance rover ready to land at previously unreachable Jezero Crater

The Mars Perseverance rover is preparing to land on the Red Planet after a seven-month journey. The rover was launched back in July 2020 and is the largest ever vehicle sent to Mars.

The one-tonne rover was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and has a robotic arm that’s two meters long. Equipped with 19 cameras and two microphones, the rover is ready to record the Martian land- and soundscape.

If the Perseverance rover has a smooth landing and arrives intact, it will be the fifth rover to successfully complete the journey since Pathfinder made the journey in 1997.

Mars Perseverance rover: What you need to know

When and where will the rover land?

The Mars perseverance rover is expected to place its six wheels on a landing site at around 15:55 Eastern Standard Time (EST), or 22:55 South African Standard Time (SAST) on 18 February 2021.

The rover will “characterise the planet’s climate and geology and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet”. Perseverance weighs 1 043 kilograms and will be the first Mars rover equipped with a helicopter.

Its most important instruments are two lasers and an X-ray which, when projected on rocks, can analyse their chemical composition and identify possible organic compounds.

“Understanding where Mars would have been habitable in the past, and what kind of fingerprints of life you’re looking for, was a necessary precursor to then going, at significant expense, to this very well selected spot that would produce these samples”.

G. Scott Hubbard, Stanford University

We will share a live stream of the landing closer to the time.

Jezero crater

The landscape where it is meant to land – the 45-kilometre-wide Jezero Crater – was described as “spectacular” by Ken Farley, a NASA scientist. Jezero is located in the Martian northern hemisphere and had been unreachable until now.

Scientists believe Jezero crater was home to a river that flowed into a lake that around 3.5 billion years ago, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta. It’s believed that Mars “was very similar to Earth” at that time.

“It had a substantial atmosphere, it had lakes and rivers on its surface, and it had habitable environments, places where organisms that we know about on earth today could have thrived.”

Ken Farley, NASA scientist

Farley explained that Mars is the only known place outside our planet where such conditions arose; the Mars 2020 is the first mission with the explicit aim of finding evidence that life once existed there. Read more about the Jezero Crater here.

The live stream of Perseverance Rover’s July 2020 launch can be viewed here.

Ken Farley quotes from AFP.