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Let's go to Mars

Perseverance lands in Jezero, and we watch it happen

Five off-the-shelf cameras filmed the parachute opening and the sky crane lowering a one-tonne rover into a dry river delta. The descent microphone recorded nothing usable.

A round, fisheye black-and-white view from a camera low on the rover: flat, rock-strewn Martian ground running back to a pale horizon, the rover's own angular shadow across the lower left, and dust specks scattered over the clear lens cover.
The first image Perseverance sent back after touching down in Jezero crater on 18 February 2021. The view, from one of the rover's Hazard Cameras, is partly obscured by the clear dust cover still over the lens. · Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Perseverance's landing on the floor of Jezero crater was confirmed at 20:55 UTC on 18 February 2021. Light takes eleven minutes to reach Earth, so the landing had resolved itself before JPL heard the first tone. The rover weighed 1,025 kilograms, its 7.7-by-6.6-kilometre target ellipse covering boulders, cliffs and sand dunes.

Earlier missions had picked flat ground because they could not steer. Terrain-Relative Navigation gave the rover a downward camera and a stored hazard map; under the parachute it matched the view to the map and fixed its position, then diverted under rocket power. The 21.5-metre parachute, packed into a nylon-and-Kevlar cylinder 46 by 66 centimetres, fired about 230 seconds after entry, still supersonic, reaching full canopy in under a second at tens of thousands of pounds of force. Its orange-and-white panels encode "Dare Mighty Things" in binary, with the coordinates of JPL.

Two cameras on the back shell, one on the descent stage and two on the rover filmed the descent. Curiosity's descent imager had returned a downward-looking video in 2012; this came from five angles at once: the chute snapping open at 11 kilometres, the heat shield falling away, dust blasting under the descent rockets, cables paying out, wheels settling. The landing site is named for the novelist Octavia E. Butler.

The descent microphone returned no usable data but survived. On 20 February it recorded sixty seconds on the surface: rover machinery, and about ten seconds in, a faint gust of wind — what NASA called the first audio recording of Mars. Two earlier attempts, on Mars Polar Lander and Phoenix, never got that far.

Jezero was chosen for what orbiters could only infer: a river once cut Neretva Vallis through the crater rim and built a sediment fan on the floor. Perseverance confirmed it within months, in a Science paper of late 2021: the layered scarps are a delta, the boulders capping them flood deposits dropped by water moving fast enough to carry metre-scale rocks. The mission cost about 2.7 billion dollars. Bolted to the rover's belly was a small helicopter; inside it, an oxygen machine and forty-three titanium tubes.