The US space agency "NASA" announced the landing of the "PERSEVERANCE" spacecraft on Thursday on the surface of Mars, ending a record flight that began about 7 months ago and covered 470 million kilometers.
The main mission of the craft - which will take years and is considered the most advanced - is to verify the existence of past life on the surface of the Red Planet.
Cries of joy erupted at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles, as radio signals were picked up confirming the success of the landing and the spacecraft's survival from a dangerous flight.
Perseverance penetrated the Martian atmosphere at a speed of 19 thousand kilometers per hour, and then reached the landing point on its surface in an important scientific event.
The huge rover landed in the "Jizero" crater, which scientists believe contained a lake 3.5 billion years ago, and is considered the most dangerous landing site at all due to its topography.
And Perseverance is the fifth vehicle to land on Mars, and all of these five are American. It landed the first in 1997, while one of them - the "Curiosity" vehicle - is still roaming today on the surface of the Red Planet.
But unlike the previous four vehicles, the overt goal of the Perseverance mission is to search for traces of past life on the planet, by collecting about 30 rock samples over a period of years.
Mission team members express their jubilation at the successful landing (French)
Dizzying success
The landing of the Perseverance is a remarkable success, given the great risks the flight faced.
The successful landing at the Jezero crater marks the first station of the spacecraft, looking for signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.
The spacecraft, which was launched by the US Space Agency in late July, is equipped with advanced technical means, including 23 cameras that take pictures 10 times the resolution of the Curiosity spacecraft, which launched to Mars in November 2011.
It is also the first time that a Martian vehicle carries microphones to record sound on the surface of the planet, but the most striking in this mission will undoubtedly be that part designed to drill into the Earth and extract samples and then preserve them for delivery to another vehicle that will arrive in 2028.
Compared to the previous Curiosity mission, Perseverance has almost the same design, as it is square and about 3 meters long side, with a height of about two meters, the size of two small cars parked next to each other.
Perseverance can be seen as an improved engineering image from Curiosity that the team itself worked on, and those external improvements are clearly visible in developing the vehicle's wheels to become faster and more able to travel in the sand without getting stuck, which will enable it to travel 200 meters per day.