Jacob Pinter

You're listening to NASA's Curious Universe.

I'm your host, Jacob Pinter.

February 18th, 2021 was a nail-biter of a day at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

More than 140 million miles away, a capsule was hurtling through the atmosphere of another planet.

Packed inside was a nuclear-powered, car-sized, six-wheeled rover called Perseverance.

Thousands of NASA engineers had spent years designing and building this thing.

The spacecraft had to withstand the long journey to the Martian surface, and then the rover inside had to survive the harsh environment there.

Katie Stack Morgan is the project scientist for the Perseverance Mars rover.

So she was one of the folks doing the nail biting.

Now, Katie had watched a Mars landing before for the Curiosity rover, which touched down in 2012, but that one felt different.

This time, she was one of the scientists in charge of all the research this rover would do on Mars for years to come.

And for that to happen, first, it had to land safely.

This phase of a Mars mission is called Entry, Descent, and Landing, or EDL.

But it has another name, the seven minutes of terror.

That's because in the seven minutes it takes to reach the planet's surface from orbit, a lot has to go just right.

And with the time delay between Earth and Mars, you can't control what's happening in real time.

All you can do is watch and wait and hope the spacecraft does exactly what you programmed it to do.

Fortunately, spoiler alert,

There was a collective sigh of relief.

On the footage from the capsule's cameras, you can see the red, dusty surface come into focus and a big crater called Jezero growing larger and larger.