NASA on Thursday successfully landed a new robotic rover on Mars as part of a mission to search for life beyond planet Earth.

Cheers erupted in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, Calif., as the Perseverance rover touched down safely on the red planet just before 4 p.m. Thursday after entering its atmosphere at more than 12,000 miles per hour. The rover had been traveling through space since it was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida at the end of July.

Perseverance is NASA’s fifth rover to land on Mars and will kick off a twoyear mission roaming the planet’s surface in search of signs of ancient life.

Perseverance landed on the planet’s Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake that existed nearly 4 billion years ago.

The carsized robotic explorer is equipped with a drill, a robotic arm and several other sophisticated scientific tools that will enable it to collect rock and dirt samples that will be picked up by a future mission to Mars and brought back to Earth.

“NASA works. When we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does. This is what we can do as a country on all of the problems we have, we need to work together to do these kinds of things,” NASA chief engineer Rob Manning said following the landing.

The rover is also carrying a small helicopter dubbed Ingenuity, which is aiming to explore Mars by air. If successful, the aircraft will be the first of its kind to fly on another planet.

The mission was the latest of three that made it to Mars this month. Two spacecraft launched by the United Arab Emirates and China began orbiting the red planet last week.


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