Perseverance and Ingenuity: Mars' Greatest Achievement

# Astronomy Tonight Podcast

This is your Astronomy Tonight podcast.

On February 19th, we celebrate one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of planetary exploration: the arrival of the Perseverance rover on Mars in 2021!

Picture this: after a harrowing seven-minute descent through the Martian atmosphere—what NASA engineers called "seven minutes of terror"—the car-sized robotic explorer touched down in Jezero Crater, ready to hunt for signs of ancient microbial life. But Perseverance wasn't alone in this cosmic journey. Nestled in a special compartment on its belly was Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter no bigger than a shoebox, weighing just 1.8 kilograms.

Everyone said a helicopter couldn't fly on Mars. The atmosphere is less than 1% as dense as Earth's, and the temperatures plunge to minus 90 degrees Celsius at night. Impossible, they said. But when Ingenuity made its first flight on April 19th, 2021—just two months after landing—it proved the naysayers spectacularly wrong by becoming the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet. It was the Wright Brothers moment of the space age!

Since then, Perseverance has been busy collecting rock samples and searching for biosignatures while Ingenuity served as a scout, mapping terrain and expanding our rover's reach far beyond what wheels alone could accomplish.

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This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI