Pasadena, California · 18 February 2021
NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed in Jezero Crater on Mars at approximately 3:55 p.m. EST (20:55 UTC) on 18 February 2021, culminating a 203-day journey covering 470 million kilometres from Earth. The touchdown marked the most precise landing in NASA's Mars exploration history and the beginning of the agency's most ambitious astrobiology mission to date.
The rover, also known as Percy, launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on 30 July 2020. It arrived at Mars as part of NASA's Mars 2020 mission, carrying a suite of scientific instruments designed to search for biosignatures of ancient microbial life, characterise the planet's climate and geology, and collect rock and regolith samples for potential future return to Earth.
The Landing: Seven Minutes of Terror
Perseverance's entry, descent, and landing — the notorious "seven minutes of terror" — required the spacecraft to decelerate from approximately 19,500 km/h to a gentle touchdown in under seven minutes. The sequence involved a heat shield, supersonic parachute deployment, and the sky crane manoeuvre, which lowered the rover on tethers to the Martian surface.
NASA officially named the landing site "Octavia E. Butler Landing" on 5 March 2021, in honour of the acclaimed science fiction author whose work explored themes of survival, adaptation, and humanity's future.
Why Jezero Crater?
Jezero Crater was selected from over 60 candidate sites after a five-year evaluation process. Scientists believe the crater once held a lake fed by a river channel, creating a delta deposit where sedimentary rocks — the type most likely to preserve biosignatures — accumulated. The site offers access to some of the oldest potentially habitable environments on Mars.
The crater's geological diversity makes it an ideal location for the rover's primary scientific objective: searching for signs of ancient microbial life. Perseverance carries instruments including the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) and the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), which can detect organic compounds and map the elemental composition of rocks at microscopic scales.
Technology Demonstrations
Perseverance carried two major technology demonstrations to Mars:
- Ingenuity helicopter: A 1.8-kilogram autonomous rotorcraft that became the first vehicle to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity's first flight on 19 April 2021 — a 39-second hover at 3 metres altitude — was a Wright Brothers moment for interplanetary aviation.
- MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment): A device that successfully demonstrated oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere, which is 96% carbon dioxide. MOXIE's first successful run on 20 April 2021 produced approximately 5.4 grams of oxygen — enough to sustain an astronaut for about 10 minutes of breathing.
Sample Collection for Future Return
One of Perseverance's most consequential tasks is collecting and caching samples of Martian rock and soil. The rover carries 43 titanium sample tubes and is designed to drill core samples from scientifically interesting rocks, seal them, and deposit them on the Martian surface for retrieval by a future mission.
The Mars Sample Return campaign — a joint endeavour between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) — aims to retrieve these cached samples and return them to Earth for analysis using laboratory instruments far more powerful than anything that can be sent to Mars. If successful, it would be the first time samples from another planet have been brought to Earth.
A Global Effort
The Mars 2020 mission involves contributions from multiple international partners. The rover's SuperCam instrument was developed in collaboration with France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and includes contributions from Spain. The mission also carries a weather station called MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer), developed by Spain's Centro de Astrobiología.
Perseverance's landing was watched live by millions worldwide, with NASA streaming the event from mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The first image from the rover — a grainy black-and-white photo showing the Martian surface and one of the rover's wheels — was transmitted within minutes of touchdown.
Sources
- NASA Mars 2020 Mission:
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mars 2020 Press Kit:
- NASA, "Perseverance Rover's Landing Site Named for Octavia E. Butler" (5 March 2021)
- Wikipedia, "Perseverance (rover)":
- NASA, "NASA's Perseverance Rover Successfully Lands on Mars" (18 February 2021)
FIRAT Editorial Board
Institutional Research Desk · Foresight Institute of Research and Translation
The collective editorial and research translation board of FIRAT, synthesising peer-reviewed evidence, policy briefs, and division milestones across our seven foundational research pillars.
