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Washington (AP) - After around six months of flight time, the US rover "Perseverance" is scheduled to land on Mars today.
The robot of the US space agency NASA, which was launched at the end of July 2020 from the Cape Canaveral spaceport, is supposed to touch down around 9:30 p.m. CET with a risky maneuver in a dry lake called “Jezero Crater” that has never been examined on site.
The around 2.5 billion dollars (about 2.2 billion euros) expensive NASA rover "Perseverance" (in German: stamina) was designed and built for around eight years and is supposed to search for traces of earlier microbial life on Mars, as well as exploring the planet's climate and geology.
On board, the roughly 1,000 kilogram robot the size of a small car has 7 scientific instruments, 23 cameras and a laser, among other things.
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The rover will enable numerous NASA premieres: For the first time, microphones will be sent to Mars with "Perseverance", for the first time a small helicopter and for the first time samples will be brought back to Earth from Mars in a mission developed jointly with the European space agency Esa.
If “Perseverance” lands, it would be the fifth rover that NASA brings to Mars - most recently in 2012 “Curiosity”.
Overall, less than half of all Mars missions launched worldwide have so far been successful.
In the past week, space probes first from the United Arab Emirates and then from China were successfully swiveled into orbit the planet.
"Al-Amal", the probe of the United Arab Emirates, is not supposed to land, the landing of the Chinese spaceship "Tianwen 1" is planned in two to three months.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210218-99-487215 / 2