Nasa’s ‘Perseverance’ rover lands on Mars

Mission controllers receive radio signal soon after car-sized vehicle touches down on the Jezero crater

Nasa’s Perseverance rover, by far the most sophisticated vehicle sent from Earth to Mars, has landed successfully on the red planet.

For the next two years the car-sized vehicle will search for signs of life, launch a helicopter and prepare the way for future human visits.

Mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California received a radio signal from Perseverance at about 9pm GMT, indicating it had touched down 11 minutes earlier on Jezero crater, close to the Martian equator, after a 470m km flight from Earth.

Because of Covid-19 restrictions, celebrations in the JPL control room were slightly more sedate than usual on successful Mars landings. The room erupted with cheers, clapping and fist-bumping, though without the traditional hugs, as the scientists and engineers — all masked — celebrated the rover’s arrival in good shape.

A minute or two later the first picture appeared, a fuzzy black-and-white image of the crater floor.

Perseverance had survived the famous “seven minutes of terror”, a term coined for previous Mars landings. That is the time it takes to decelerate from the entry speed of 20,000kph, when the craft reaches the Martian atmosphere, to a touchdown at slower than walking pace.

The landing technology deployed was an upgraded version of the one on Curiosity, the last Nasa rover to land on Mars, in 2012. Added features included a “range trigger” to guide the opening of the craft’s parachute and maximise the chance of a gentle touchdown.

Perseverance cut itself free from its parachute and began a rocket-powered descent using a jetpack with eight engines pointed downward. The final phase involved a “sky crane” lowering the rover to the surface on a set of cables.

When the lander sensed that its wheels had touched the ground, it cut the cables connecting it to the descent vehicle, which flew off to crash-land a safe distance away.

The primary objective of Perseverance’s two-year $2.7bn mission is to search for signs of any ancient microbes that might have flourished when water flowed on Mars about 3bn years ago.

The rover will journey around the ancient and now desiccated terrain, armed with instruments to dig and probe the rocks and soil — physically and chemically — for fossilised signs of ancient life. Scientists do not expect to find living organisms.

An aerial view of the crater will be provided by the Ingenuity helicopter, weighing just 1.8kg. It is not part of the primary science mission but what Nasa calls a technology demonstration, to show how well a rotorcraft can perform in the Martian atmosphere — which is just 1 per cent as dense as Earth’s.

Another technology experiment is the toaster-sized Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or Moxie, which will make oxygen out of the thin air on Mars by electrochemically breaking down carbon dioxide. If astronauts are to land and live on the red planet, they would need locally generated oxygen to breathe and to burn fuel.

Perseverance will also leave a legacy on the Martian surface for future missions. Its Sample Caching System will put broken rock and dust into metal canisters and leave them behind to be collected and brought to Earth by future missions that Nasa is planning in collaboration with the European Space Agency.