D-day for the Perseverance rover.

Launched in July by the Atlas 5 rocket, which took off from Cape Canaveral base in Florida, the new generation six-wheel rover is due to land on Thursday, February 18 at 8:55 p.m. GMT (9:55 p.m. Paris time), on the Jezero crater, an area where water would have been present about three billion years ago.

The images of the arrival of the robot on the red planet, at a speed of approximately 19,300 km / h, will be broadcast live on several platforms: the CNRS Dailymotion channel, the CNES YouTube and Twitch channels, the YouTube channel d'Arte, and that of the City of Science and Industry, in partnership with the Paris-PSL Observatory, with insights from scientists and astronauts.

In this context, Emmanuel Macron must go to the Paris headquarters of the National Center for Space Studies (Cnes) to witness the landing live.

The Head of State will take advantage of this visit to meet with researchers and astrophysicists, as well as by videoconference with astronaut Thomas Pesquet, currently in the midst of preparations in the United States for his second flight, in April, to the United States. International Space Station (ISS).

>> To see: "Perseverance, the rover that wants to unravel the mysteries of Mars"

"Seven minutes of terror"

The most critical phase of the landing will last seven minutes, "seven minutes of terror" according to NASA's expression.

Bigger and more sophisticated than its predecessors, Perseverance, whose two-year mission is valued at $ 2.7 billion, is able to take rock samples that will then be analyzed on Earth.

This vehicle, the largest and most advanced ever sent to the red planet, is equipped with a super powerful camera, the SuperCam, developed by a consortium of laboratories, including the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP) and Cnes.

Its goal is to analyze the ground, to look for possible traces of past life and to examine the possibility of a human exploration of Mars.

With AFP and Reuters

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