Launched in July, the Mars rover, named Perseverance, is scheduled to land on the red planet on Thursday (Feb. 18) at 3:35 p.m. ET.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will carry a livestream of the landing at ajc.com. It will also be carried on NASA’s YouTube channel and NASA TV beginning at 2:15 p.m.
Perseverance is the latest in a series of missions focused on assessing how habitable Mars was in the ancient past. The mission represents a crucial pivot point in NASA’s Mars exploration because the rover will cache the most promising samples for a future Mars sample-return mission to Earth later this decade, if everything goes to schedule.
The rover’s landing site is the Jezero Crater.
Another historic first for the Perseverance mission will be a helicopter, called Ingenuity, that will test fly on Mars for the first time. The hope is to use such small drones for scouting ahead of astronaut missions, or exploring dangerous regions, in future Mars missions.
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