I thought about being all snarky about our next story, but I can’t find it in me. I’m too excited.

At approximately 2055 UTC on February 18, Percy landed on Mars! I admit that I might not have been as hyped as possible at the time of the landing because I was too busy being the consummate professional that I am, interviewing guests and keeping a show running. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t amazing. We have, once again, landed a small SUV on Mars.

Perseverance is the last of three missions launched last July to arrive at the Red Planet, alongside the United Arab Emirates’ Al’Amal and China’s Tianwen-1. Unlike those other two missions, Percy didn’t settle into a Martian orbit first. Nope. The U.S. mission screamed in toward the surface immediately and went right for the landing, using the same method as Curiosity, sky crane and all.

There are a lot of differences between the previous rover and Percy, though. First, Perseverance is explicitly going to look for signs of ancient microbial life. While previous missions have happily made progress toward determining if life was possible on Mars, this is the first mission that has the instruments to actually seek out those new life forms. Maybe new life forms? We won’t know unless we find them.

Additionally, Percy carries a microphone — a first for a Martian rover, and an instrument requested for decades. In fact, we have an 18-second clip of sound from Mars. Take a moment to appreciate the scope of this clip: we have recorded sounds from another planet. Credit where credit is due, the Soviet Union did this with two of the Venera missions, 13 and 14. Let’s take a quick listen: click here. 

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Mars mission these days without images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment or HiRISE aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Not only did HiRISE capture all the various bits of the descent system on the surface, but there is also an amazing image of the rover descending on its parachute. This is a particularly amazing image, as HiRISE isn’t a camera in the point-and-shoot respect. It’s a push broom scanner, which means it’s like using a fax machine to capture a photo of an airplane that’s in flight. NASA wrote: The extreme distance and high speeds of the two spacecraft were challenging conditions that required precise timing and for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to both pitch upward and roll hard to the left so that Perseverance was viewable by HiRISE at just the right moment.

We also have a video. The video covers the landing from the parachute deployment all the way to touchdown.

I get teary-eyed every time I watch it. Simply stunning. That is Mars, everyone. Mars. Whew.

But it’s not just about the landing. Mastcam-Z is a pair of zoomable science cameras, and they’ve already captured their first calibration images. Plus there’s SuperCam, which has a pulsed laser to study rock and sediment chemistry and contains that microphone we mentioned earlier. There are two instruments, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) and the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) to do close up geology. SHERLOC even has an imager called the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering (WATSON) that will be used to map out minerals and organic molecules on the surface of rocks.

There’s also the ground-penetrating radar called the Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX), the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) instrument to study climate and dust, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) to try and manufacture oxygen out of literally thin air, and last but not least, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. Ingenuity is an engineering demonstration attempting to perform controlled flight on another world. “Ginny” has already reported that everything is nominal, and now we wait for a month or two before operations are attempted.

Overall, Thursday was an amazing day, Percy is safe on Mars, and now we finally can talk about all the great science that will come out of this mission. Oh, and about that parachute. Do yourself a favor and search for “Perseverance parachute code”. You might find you want to “Dare Mighty Things”.

More Information

NASA JPL press release (Landing)

NASA press release

HiRISE press release

NASA JPL press release (Ingenuity)