Astonishing facts, pictures and videos are in!

Any minute of the briefing is interesting, but when you want to see the first release of the "Perseverance Landing Video" on Mars from February 18, 2021, go here:

15:14

NASA landed their 2020 Mars Rover Perseverance on February 18 at 3:55 p.m. EST (20:55 UTC) in a thrilling and exciting landing on Mars at Jezero Crater.

“Perseverance is NASA’s most ambitious Mars rover mission yet, focused scientifically on finding out whether there was ever any life on Mars in the past,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “To answer this question, the landing team will have its hands full getting us to Jezero Crater – the most challenging Martian terrain ever targeted for a landing.”

Jezero is a basin where scientists believe an ancient river flowed into a lake and deposited sediments in a fan shape known as a delta. Scientists think the environment here was likely to have preserved signs of any life that gained a foothold billions of years ago – but Jezero also has steep cliffs, sand dunes, and boulder fields. Landing on Mars is difficult – only about 50% of all previous Mars landing attempts have succeeded – and these geological features make it even more so. The Perseverance team is building on lessons from previous touchdowns and employing new technologies that enable the spacecraft to target its landing site more accurately and avoid hazards autonomously.

Shortly after Perseverance landed on the surface, the first pictures of the engineering cam were transmitted. Now in the upcoming days, engineers will also check on the health of the rover and deploy the remote sensing mast (otherwise known as its “head”) so it can take more pictures. The Perseverance team will then take more than a month to thoroughly inspect the rover and load new flight software to prepare for its search for ancient life on Mars. During the same period, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter team will be making sure their small but mighty robot is prepared for the first attempt at controlled, powered aerodynamic flight on another planet.

Get the Mars 2020 Press Kit: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/mars_2020/landing/
All that you want to know: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline/landing/