How to watch NASA’s Perseverance rover land on Mars today

By Georgina Torbet Published April 28, 2022

NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV

Update: NASA’s Perseverance rover has successfully landed on Mars! We’ve got all the juicy details right here.

Recommended Videos

Later today, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will attempt a feat that is terrifying and impressive in equal measures: Landing a rover on Mars. The Perseverance rover, along with its helicopter sidekick Ingenuity, has been traveling to Mars since summer last year.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Now, it’s set to arrive at the red planet on Thursday, February 18, and execute the extremely challenging landing maneuver that will allow it to touch down safely and begin its search for signs of ancient life.

How to watch the landing

The rover is scheduled to land on Mars at approximately 3:55 p.m. ET/12:55 p.m. PT on Thursday, February 18. NASA will be livestreaming coverage of the event, including mission commentary on its TV channel, NASA TV, as well as its website, beginning at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT.

You can tune in using the video embedded at the top of this page.

If you prefer to see what the engineers themselves are up to during landing, there will also be a clean feed of cameras from the Jet Propulsion Lab’s Mission Control, with mission audio only instead of commentary. You can tune into that feed via JPL’s Raw YouTube channel, or see a blend of mission control and landing commentary on JPL’s main YouTube channel.

What to expect from the landing

An illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover landing safely on Mars. Hundreds of critical events must execute perfectly and exactly on time for the rover to land safely on Feb. 18, 2021. — An illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover landing safely on Mars. Hundreds of critical events must be executed perfectly and exactly on time for the rover to land safely on February 18, 2021. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Perseverance is approaching its seven minutes of terror, in which the rover’s spacecraft will need to slow from 12,000 mph down to a comfortable landing speed using a combination of a parachute, a descent stage with engines pointed downward, and the rover being lowered to the surface on cables.

One of the (many) challenges of this maneuver is the communication delay of up to 20 minutes on Mars, meaning that engineers can’t control the landing directly — they have programmed the craft to perform the landing and can only wait and watch to see if it is successful.

Around half of all missions to Mars fail, and a landing is always a nail-biting event. But the NASA team can have some confidence, as both the rover and the landing procedure are very similar to the Curiosity rover, which successfully landed on Mars in 2012. Everyone is hoping for a repeat of another smooth landing.

“If there’s one thing we know, it’s that landing on Mars is never easy,” said Marc Etkind, NASA’s associate administrator for communications. “But as NASA’s fifth Mars rover, Perseverance has an extraordinary engineering pedigree and mission team. We are excited to invite the entire world to share this exciting event with us!”

In the days after the landing, on Friday, February 19, and Monday, February 22, there will be updates at 1 p.m. ET and 2 p.m. ET, respectively, on the health and status of the rover.

Topics

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…

Space

Relive Mars rover’s ‘7 minutes of terror’ during landing 12 years ago

An animation showing the Curiosity spacecraft heading toward Mars.

At 1:31 a.m. ET on August 6, 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover made a spectacular landing on the surface of Mars.

To mark the 12th anniversary, NASA has shared a video (below) in which members of the Curiosity team talk about how they achieved the remarkable feat, paying particular attention to the so-called “seven minutes of terror” during the final moments of descent.

Space

Perseverance rover finds tantalizing hints of possible ancient life on Mars

mars 2020 perseverance rover

NASA's Perseverance rover was sent to Mars with one big, ambitious aim: to see if life could ever have thrived on our neighboring planet. Although there's unlikely to be anything alive on Mars now, the planet was once similar to Earth, with a thicker atmosphere and plentiful water on its surface. And during this time, billions of years ago, microbial life could have survived there. Now, Perseverance has located some tantalizing indications of possible microbial life -- although it's too early for scientists to be sure.

The rover has been taking samples by drilling into the martian rock as it travels, and it's a recent sample from an area called the Cheyava Falls that has ignited interest. The rock, collected on July 21, has indications of chemical signatures and physical structures that could potentially have been formed by life, such as the presence of organic compounds. These carbon-based molecules are the building blocks of life; however, they can also be formed by other processes.

Space

How NASA is using AI on the Perseverance rover to study Mars rocks

akdjf alkjdhf lk

Space engineers have been using AI in rovers for some time now -- hence why today's Mars explorers are able to pick a safe landing site and to drive around a region autonomously. But something they haven't been able to do before now is to do science themselves, as most of that work is done by scientists on Earth who analyze data and point the rover toward targets they want to investigate.

Now, though, NASA's Perseverance rover is taking the first steps toward autonomous science investigation on Mars. The rover has been testing out an AI capability for the last three years, which allows it to search for and identify particular minerals in Mars rocks. The system works using the rover's PIXL instrument (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), a spectrometer that uses light to analyze what rocks are made of. The software, called adaptive sampling, looks though PIXL's data and identifies minerals to be studied in more detail.

nproxy.org