NASA s Perseverance Rover 22 Days From Mars Landing
Perseverance’s Stages of Descent (Illustration): This illustration depicts the some of the major milestones NASA’s Perseverance rover will go through during its seven-minute descent to the Martian surface on Feb. 18, 2021. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Full image and caption ›
Seven minutes of harrowing descent to the Red Planet is in the not-so-distant future for the agency’s Mars 2020 mission.
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission is just 22 days from landing on the surface of Mars. The spacecraft has about 25.6 million miles (41.2 million kilometers) remaining in its 292.5-million-mile (470.8-million-kilometer) journey and is currently closing that distance at 1.6 miles per second (2.5 kilometers per second). Once at the top of the Red Planet’s atmosphere, an action-packed seven minutes of descent awaits – complete with temperatures equivalent to the surface of the Sun, a supersonic parachute inflation, and t
NASA animation showing the upcoming landing of the Perseverance rover. (Gif: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Gizmodo)
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In just 57 days, NASA’s Perseverance rover will attempt a landing on Mars. Mission controllers say it’ll be “seven minutes of terror,” as this new depiction demonstrates in dramatic fashion.
Produced by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the digital animation depicts key events during the entry, descent, and landing (EDL) of the Perseverance rover. The video is just over three minutes in length, which isn’t much shorter than the landing phase itself, which should take around seven minutes. Perseverance launched on July 30, and will perform the EDL on Feb. 18, 2021 at 3:30 p.m. EST.