Perseverance landed on Mars and Ingenuity is

It’s 3:55 PM Eastern. I’m watching NASA JPL’s livestream. The control room is masked, socially distanced, pandemic protocol. The atmosphere is still electric.

Perseverance entered the Martian atmosphere seven minutes ago. Because of the signal delay, everything I’m watching already happened. The rover is either on the surface or it isn’t. The outcome is already determined. I’m just waiting for the light to travel.

Cruise stage separation. Confirmed. Parachute deploy. Confirmed. Heat shield separation. Confirmed. Radar lock on the ground. The sky crane fires its retro-rockets. I’m gripping my desk.

“Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars.”

The control room erupts. Fist bumps, because you can’t hug in a pandemic. The camera cuts to the first image: a grainy, dusty, black-and-white photo from a hazard avoidance camera. The Martian surface. Rocks. Shadows. The wheel of the rover visible in the corner.

I set my reminder seven months ago, the day it launched. I watched it leave Earth. Now I’m watching it arrive on Mars. The gap between those two moments contains every equation, every trajectory correction, every terrifying decision that the autonomous landing system made without human input.

The rover is alone on Mars. Making its own choices. It landed itself.

Ingenuity

Strapped to the belly of Perseverance is a 1.8 kilogram helicopter called Ingenuity. In a few weeks, it’ll be deployed onto the surface, and it will attempt the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.

I wrote about this when it launched. The Martian atmosphere is 1% as dense as Earth’s. The blades spin at 2,400 RPM. The whole thing weighs less than a bag of sugar.

The Wright Brothers carried a piece of the Kitty Hawk Flyer’s fabric. From the first flight on Earth to the first flight on Mars. 118 years of distance and 300 million miles of space between two moments of leaving the ground.

I’m going to set another reminder. For the day Ingenuity flies. I’ll be here.

Jezero Crater

The landing site is a dried-up lakebed. 3.5 billion years ago, water flowed into this crater through a river delta, depositing sediments that might contain signs of ancient microbial life. Perseverance is going to drill core samples and leave them in tubes on the surface for a future mission to collect and bring home.

We’re leaving little tubes of Mars rocks in the dirt, on the assumption that we’ll come back for them. The optimism of that gesture gets me every time.

Right now, in Jezero Crater, a one-ton robot is sitting in the dust, cameras powered up, instruments warming, ready to start looking for evidence that we weren’t always alone in this solar system.

The first high-resolution color image should arrive in the next few days. I’ll be refreshing the NASA Mars page until it does.

The seven minutes of terror are over. Now the science begins.

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