On Thursday, February 18, 2021 at about 1:55pm MST the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter drone will land on Mars! The NASA TV broadcast from Mission Control starts at 12:15pm MST.
Watch live online the events on Earth with “some” delay from Mars.
The Perseverance rover has four science objectives that support the Mars Exploration Program’s science goals:
Looking for Habitability: | Identify past environments capable of supporting microbial life. |
Seeking Biosignatures: | Seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in special rocks known to preserve signs of life over time. |
Caching Samples: | Collect core rock and “soil” samples and store them on the Martian surface. |
Preparing for Humans: |
Test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere. |
There is an amazing way to track the landing as well as more NASA missions and other stuff using an application from NASA called Eyes at https://eyes.nasa.gov. This only works on Windoze or Mac. 🙁
Perseverance is on Mars! See images at https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/