I’m Landing on Mars Today

I bought my ticket more than a year ago and have been looking forward to today for a long time.  I just need to make it thru ‘seven minutes of terror’ to land.

During landing, I will plunge through the thin Martian atmosphere, with the heat shield first, at a speed of over 12,000 mph (about 20,000 kph). A parachute and powered descent slow me down to about 2 mph (three-fourths of a meter per second). A large sky crane then lowers me on three bridle cords to land softly on six wheels. Landing on Mars is hard.

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I just hope all goes well or I will be splattered across Jezero crater and Isidis Planitia.  

Jezero crater sits within the Isidis Planitia region of Mars, where an ancient meteorite impact left behind a large crater some 750 miles (1200 kilometers) across. This event is known as Isidis impact, and it forever changed the rock at the base of the crater. A later, smaller meteorite impact created the Jezero crater within the Isidis impact basin. Scientists believe that these events likely created environments friendly to life. There is evidence of ancient river flow into Jezero, forming a delta that has long since been dry.

Jezero crater is thus likely to have been habitable in the distant past. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s CRISM instrument has revealed that the crater contains clays, which only form in the presence of water. On Earth, scientists have found such clays in the Mississippi river delta, where microbial life has been found embedded in the rock itself. This makes Jezero crater a great place to fulfill the Mars 2020 mission’s science goal of studying a potentially habitable environment that may still preserve signs of past life.

At Jezero crater, Perseverance should be able to access rocks that are as old as 3.6 billion years. There are many ideas about what early Mars was like, and how it came to be what it is today. Accessing the ancient rock at Jezero crater should help answer some of these questions, and tell us more about the formation of rocky planets. It is also a great location for the rover to collect a variety of samples of Martian rock and soil.

You can find out more and watch it all live HERE.