Mars Rover Perseverance successfully landed on planet Mars on Thursday and this becomes the awakening of a new era at NASA space station and around the globe for Space lovers

Perseverance Rover has landed on Mars

The good news for all the mighty outer space lovers that after a nerve-wracking seven-minute descent, the largest and most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world touched down on Mars Thursday, after a 203-day long journey traversing 293 million miles (472 million kilometers).

Confirmation of the successful touchdown was announced in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 3:55 p.m. EST (12:55 p.m. PST).

After executing a daring and beautiful landing which was called, “seven minutes of terror,” ‘Perseverance’ is now NASA’s fifth rover to land on Mars and is set to begin a two-year mission to roam its surface and search for signs of ancient microbial life.

Planet Mars

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, being larger than only Mercury. It is also called as the “Red Planet”. It is called the red planet because of the effect of the iron oxide prevalent on Mars’s surface, which gives it a reddish appearance distinctive among the astronomical bodies visible to the naked eye.

Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere, with surface features reminiscent of the impact craters of the Moon and the valleys, deserts and polar ice caps of Earth.

The days and seasons are practically identical to those of Earth, in light of the fact that the rotational period just as the slant of the rotational hub comparative with the ecliptic plane is comparable. Mars is the site of Olympus Mons, the biggest Mountain of liquid magma and tallest known mountain on any planet in the Solar System, and of Valles Marineris, perhaps the biggest gulch in the Solar System. The smooth Borealis bowl in the Northern Hemisphere covers 40% of the planet and might be a goliath sway highlight. Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are little and sporadically molded. These might be caught space rocks, like 5261 Eureka, a Mars trojan.

Mission Around Planet Mars

It is additionally the most recent of three new missions that showed up at the red planet in February. Recently, two other rockets dispatched by the United Arab Emirates and China ventured into Mars and moved into space around the globe.

Some interesting Facts About Mars

-Mars and Earth have approximately the same landmass.
-Mars is home to the tallest mountain in the solar system.
-Only 18 missions to Mars have been successful.
-Mars has the largest dust storms in the solar system.
-On Mars, the Sun appears about half the size as it does on Earth.
-Pieces of Mars have fallen to Earth.
-There are signs of liquid water on Mars.
-Sunsets on Mars are blue.

The Preservance Mission on Mars

The eagerly awaited Perseverance mission could respond to key inquiries concerning Mars’ set of experiences and advancement, but at the same time, it’s an essential venturing stone toward NASA’s objective of sending people to investigate the red planet.

The acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk said, “What an amazing day, what an amazing team, the work through all the adversity and all the challenges that go with landing a rover on Mars, plus the challenges of COVID… just an amazing accomplishment. This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally – when we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks.”

“The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nation’s spirit of persevering even in the most challenging of situations, inspiring, and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet,” he added.

This successful landing will allow scientists on Earth to study samples collected by Perseverance to search for definitive signs of past life using instruments too large and complex to send to the Red Planet.

“Because of today’s exciting events, the first pristine samples from carefully documented locations on another planet are another step closer to being returned to Earth,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA. “Perseverance [nicknamed as Percy] is the first step in bringing back rock and regolith from Mars. We don’t know what these pristine samples from Mars will tell us. But what they could tell us is monumental – including that life might have once existed beyond Earth.”

This is a great advancement in the world of Space science and definitely, a breakthrough as this mission might lead to the gates of something big, including signs of water or maybe life.