A look back at the Mars 2020 landing

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Mars2020 mission control members celebrate the successful landing of the Mars Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. | Credit: NASA/JPL

February 18, 2022 marks one earth year (354 Martian sols) for the Mars Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity Helicopter on the surface of the red planet.

Over the last year, the Mars 2020 mission has hit a number of milestones, including the first autonomous helicopter flight, the first autonav drive and the first acquisition of core samples that will eventually be sent back to Earth on a future mission.

During that time, the mission has collected over 215,000 images.

It all started, however, with the first major hurdle: successfully inserting the Mars 2020 mission into orbit and then landing the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter autonomously on the surface of Mars.

It takes approximately seven minutes from the time that a space craft encounters the atmosphere of Mars, until it is on the ground (either safely, or at the bottom of new, small, crater).

This illustration shows the events that occur in the final minutes of the nearly seven-month journey that NASA’s Perseverance rover takes to Mars. | Credt: NASA/JPL

This first video recaps all of the various stages to the “7 minutes of terror” that the Mars 2020 team had to engineer to successfully land the rover:

The Nasa JPL team was ecstatic once it was confirmed that the mission was a success and the rover was safe on the surface of Mars as this next video highlights:

The mission continues. You can follow the mission on the Mars2020 twitter account, or on the Mars2020 mission website.

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