How You Can Endure 7 Minutes Of ‘Nail-Biting Terror’ With NASA As It Tries To Land Its $2.9 Billion ‘Percy’ Rover On Mars - Forbes

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is about to reach the “red planet” and make a daring landing.

Its $2.9 billion Perseverance rover—nicknamed “Percy”—will be the largest, heaviest and most sophisticated rover ever sent to Mars. 

Following online what happens to “Percy” (and the solar-powered Ingenuity Mars Helicopter experiment strapped to its belly) live on NASA TV on YouTube on Thursday, February 18 is going to involve some nervous moments.

Here’s how to follow everything online:

When is NASA landing on Mars?

Touchdown is scheduled for approximately 12:55 p.m. PST/3:55 p.m. EST on Thursday, February 18, 2021. That’s 8:55 p.m. GMT/UTC and 9:55 p.m. CET.

There’s a nice countdown timer here.

How to stream NASA’s Mars landing live

Live coverage and commentary of the landing will be beamed across the globe from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California from 1 hour 40 minutes before the landing time (11:15 a.m. PST/2:15 p.m. EST).

You can watch on NASA TV, NASA’s website, YouTube, Twitch and the NASA App. There’s also a Spanish-language stream.

How to follow NASA’s Mars landing online

For constant updates from NASA’s JPL during the descent visit Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

There’s also a special virtual guest experience that will give you notifications and mission updates, as well as a toolkit of resources and multimedia.

What will happen during NASA’s Mars landing?

It’s going to be a nail-biting “seven minutes of terror” as “Percy” slows down and attempts to land in that short time. It will be somewhat similar to the daring landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover back in 2012.

It also takes about seven minutes for the signals to get back to Earth from Mars, so by the time we hear that “Percy” has entered the Martian atmosphere it’s going to have already landed ... or crashed.

The seven minutes is going to go something like this:

• Descend through Martian atmosphere at 12,000 mph/20,000 kph.
• A parachute and powered descent to slow the rover down to about 2 mph/3 kph.
• A “sky crane” on the descent stage to lower the rover on three cables to land on six wheels at Jezero Crater.
• Touchdown on Mars!

Jezero Crater on Mars, the landing site for NASA's Mars 2020 mission. It was taken by instruments on ... [+] NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL

Where is ‘Percy’ going to land?

The 28 miles/45 kilometers-wide Jezero Crater is thought to be a four billion-year-old river delta—and it’s just possible that its clay could hold signs of ancient microbial life. It’s on the western side of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. 

Where to see the first photos from Mars

As soon as “Percy” lands in Jezero Crater it will send back photos—and this is where you can see them.

The rover is also equipped with a series of cameras to record the descent, so we should get a few “as-live” images, too.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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2021-02-17 03:00:00Z
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