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Added on the 30/07/2020 16:54:01 - Copyright : AFP EN
After seven months in space, NASA's Perseverance rover overcame a tense landing phase with a series of perfectly executed maneuvers to gently float down to the Martian soil Thursday and embark on its mission to search for signs of past life. FRANCE 24's Alyssa Caverley reports from Los Angeles.
After a seven-month journey, NASA's Perseverance rover prepares to touch down on Mars on Thursday after first negotiating a risky landing procedure that will mark the start of its multi-year search for signs of ancient microbial life. "We know Mars had water at one point, we know that it was habitable, it could have had life at one point. That's why we're going back and looking for it," Perseverance deputy project manager, Jennifer Trosper, tells AFPTV.
A vehicle filled with cameras, microphones, drills, and lasers is part of an ambitious long-term project to bring rock samples from Mars to Earth for analysis in search of life.
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has collected its first two rock samples, both slightly wider than a pencil in diameter and about six centimeters long, and now stored in sealed tubes in the rover's interior. NASA is hoping to return the samples to Earth for in depth lab analysis in a joint mission with the European Space Agency sometime in the 2030s.
Seven months after its departure from Earth, NASA's latest Mars rover is just hours away from its destination. We speak to former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman about the perils of trying to land on the red planet, how exactly the samples that Perseverance collects are supposed to get back to Earth, and whether he'll be signing up for future manned missions to Mars.
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