As many of you may know, a trip to Mars is something the United States has been working on for years! NASA has worked long and hard at getting footage of Mars so we as Americans can see if there is really life on Mars. With that being said, NASA’S rover called Percy took its descend into mars earlier this month. The rover was hovering over the martian land and went down for 7 miles. The rover has 23 cameras attached to it. There was brief audio that came from the rover. It was the breeze of the martian land, however the rover did not catch anything unusual.

Landing on Mars on February 18, 2021, the rover and its helicopter “Ingenuity” sent back data and images using NASA’S ​Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the planet since 2006. Some engineers are calling the landing of the rover the seven minutes of terror, as that is how long it took for the rover to touch the ground. After the rover touched the ground the cords detached and the rover went on its expedition around the martian land. The rover is to have a weather report using its Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer Instrument.

Over the course of its two-year exploration of the martian the rover is to search and find ancient microbial life, rocks, and sediment. That will be sent back to earth on subsequent request. The rover is the size of a car; just imagine a car sized rover driving around a planet that has never been explored yet.

Scientists say that the rover captured over 23,000 pictures and over 30 gigabytes of data. The excitement was through the roof and everyone on this journey was so excited to hear that the seven-month journey to mars was over. The rover was launched on July 30, 2020. It ​rode atop an Atlas V-541 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rover uses electrical power to move around Mars and weighs 2,260 pounds which is equal to a compact car.

If anyone was wondering how much it cost to build this rover it was a whopping 2.7 billion dollars traveling at 12,000 miles per hour on its send down the rover landed with zero problems. More and more information will be collected by the rover as time moves on. The goal is to find materials such as rocks and send them back to be studied so we can figure out things about the red planet, such as past climate and things of that nature. With this being history made, more is to be expected out of NASA and the research of other planets are underway