The National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched their latest rover last summer on July 30, 2020. Being NASA’s ninth landing on Mars, “Percy” the Rover landed beautifully on Thursday, February 18, 2020, thanks to the hard work and effort of the mission’s team. Taking SpaceX (Elon Musk’s space project) roughly eighty days, it takes NASA about six to seven months to land on the Red Planet.

Kissing the ground where Jerezro Crater lies, which is an ancient lake from three point nine million years ago. Percy’s mission is to explore around and examine rocks as they could be tested for any microfossils or proof of any type of existing life on the planet. The perseverance rover will also be returning with it’s collected samples of its rocks to back to Earth by the next decade.

As the rover landed, there were seven minutes where the NASA team didn’t have any communication with it. Moving at twelve-thousand miles per hour, Percy had to slow down one point seven miles per hour throughout the seven minutes to land in one piece. 

NASA released their video of the rover landing, where you can see the planet’s red- sandy craters as a red sand storm gently blows. We can hear in the background noise of the footage, workers calculating the distance and time the rover would have left to reach its destination. A comment on the video says, ”Everytime NASA shows videos like that I feel like it’s somewhere in Arizona.” Another view says, “I was hoping to hear “here in the next slide we have a bunch of martians waving at our rover.” 

Even President Biden calls NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk to congratulate him and the entire team on the job well done. He even tweeted, “Congratulations to NASA and everyone whose hard work made Perseverance’s historic landing possible. Today proved once again that with the power of science and American ingenuity, nothing is beyond the realm of possibility.”