Christian Elliott

The rover is now well outside Jezero crater on its fifth science campaign, the Northern Rim Campaign.

In the latest photos, you can see the crater rim way out in the background.

The science team calls this region the Wild West, the Martian frontier.

There are these huge skyscraper-sized fragments of meteor impacts all around.

We might get answers from the truly ancient rocks here as to whether there was once a magma ocean on Mars, and how exactly the planet first became habitable.

From here, the rover will head southeast to a region called Singing Canyon, which sounds pretty cool to me.

At last count, Perseverance has ground down 62 rocks to study their interiors, collected 27 rock core samples, and driven 26 miles, just shy of a marathon.

Now, we've got a lot of exciting NASA stories to share with you in the coming months.

But today, while we're all still riding this collective moon joy high, we wanted to take a look back at Artemis II.

We'll be catching up with some of the folks you've met along the way in this podcast series, and we'll share some stories I am pretty sure you haven't heard anywhere else.

But first...

Yeah, so the day after launch, when everyone was still buzzing with excitement, I pulled a couple of our friends aside for interviews.

And here's what I put together.

On April 1st, launch day, Mike Guzman went to work in the dark.

Mike's a launch engineer.

Sitting at his console in the launch control center, he remotely opened up valves to start the flow of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, the fuel for the rocket, into its tanks.

Hydrogen is the smallest element on the periodic table.

It likes to escape when you force it into something, like a huge rocket fuel tank.

And then it happened before with the SLS rocket, with Artemis I. So this time... The whole time we were sitting there

That's Joe Pavisic.