(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Today is the day! NASA’s multibillion-dollar Mars rover will arrive to Mars and almost immediately begin the process of trying to set down safely on the surface…
Once entering the atmosphere of Mars the Perseverance Rover only has 7 minutes to slow down enough to land safely on the surface and begin it’s work.
As the Perseverance descends, an onboard computer will begin to rapidly take pictures of the Martian surface, looking for features such as craters, cliffs, and large boulders to compare against previously captured orbital imagery. After the onboard computer has made 15 landmark “matches,” it will switch to a higher-resolution imaging mode to fine-tune the landing positioning.
Here is NASA explaining how it all will go down: