Mars gained a new robotic inhabitant on February 18, 2021, Perseverance.
NASA produced an animation showing how it’d look.
Here’s the landing from the control center’s perspective. I watched live. My first thought was the younger generation is in control. Oh, there were some graybeards, but the younger generation was firmly entrenched in the control center.
Its main job is to search for ancient life and collect regolith samples for a possible return to Earth. I hope that mission happens–I’d love to see that executed from 40 million miles away.
The first picture from the engineering camera used for navigation.
A color photo of one of the rover wheels, which were re-engineered to be more robust after Curiosity’s wheels sustained damage after years of use.
And this last image shows a larger landscape.
I sent my name and the name of my main character from The Music of Mars on Perseverance.
I’m an author living in northern Virginia with a wife and a cat. In the late ’80s, I worked on the International Space Station project. I recently retired from managing a group of software engineers to focus on writing science fiction and speculative fiction. Learn more.