On July 20 of last year, NASA launched the rover Perseverance toward Mars. It is racing toward Mars and arrives at 3 p.m. on February 18. It weighs a ton and is almost the size of a car. 

Of course, Perseverance is not the first Mars lander. The first successful (partly) landing was Mars 3 by the Soviet Union in 1971. It operated for only 110 seconds after landing and returned one low-quality image. The first successful lander was Viking 1 by the United States in 1976. 

There have been eight successful landings. Landing on Mars is a tricky business: more failed than succeeded. As Perseverance approaches Mars, its radio signals take 14 minutes to reach us. That 28-minute two-way delay is too long to direct the landing from Earth. Perseverance will be on its own. 

Hopefully, the landing will go like this. Perseverance will enter the atmosphere of Mars at 12,000 mph. Four minutes later, a large parachute deploys, but it only slows Perseverance to about 750 mph because the atmosphere is thin. Twenty seconds later, the heat shield detaches. The onboard radar and computer plot a landing solution. At just under six minutes, the parachute and top shield separate. Thrusters on a top platform, the Sky Crane, fire and a powered descent begins. 

As the Sky Crane hovers at about 60 feet above the Martian surface, cables unreel and lower the rover onto the Martian surface. The rover touches down about seven minutes after atmospheric entry. The nylon cables are severed and the Sky Crane flies away. NASA refers to the landing sequence as the “seven minutes of terror.” We won’t know how it went for 14 minutes as the radio-signal conformation streaks back to Earth.

Like previous NASA rovers, Perseverance will survey the surface, collect weather data, and look for past or current signs of life. Unlike its predecessors, Perseverance will collect and package samples for a return to Earth by a future mission. 

Perseverance is also taking along Ingenuity, a robotic helicopter. It’s genuinely ingenious because Mars’ air is 160 times thinner than Earth’s. Ingenuity is a testbed for the future use of drone helicopters on Mars.

So, what is in the name Perseverance? Nothing less than the character of mankind. NASA launched a nationwide campaign to name the rover. Alexander Mather, a high school student in Virginia, wrote “Curiosity, Insight, Spirit, Opportunity. If you think about it, all of these names of past Mars rovers are qualities we possess as humans…But…we missed the most important thing…The human race will always persevere into the future.” 

What a great message as we persevere through these times.