Explore Mars in 360 degrees: the awe-inspiring sights and sounds from Nasa's Perseverance mission telegraph.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from telegraph.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Nasa rover Perseverance will arrive into the planet’s orbit on February 18
Astronomers call it the “seven minutes of terror”: the chilling window in which a spacecraft has to fly 100km through Mars’s atmosphere and down towards its red, raggedy surface. At temperatures of 1,000°C, and facing notoriously unpredictable winds, the machine has to slow its speed from 12,000mph to about 2mph.
Much of the work is done by an air-resistant heat shield, which drags its speed down; then, it deploys a supersonic parachute.
Usually, with just a few miles to go, the probe breaks off from the spacecraft’s backshell; it is then guided to the surface by miniature rockets, which must immediately sever themselves once the probe hits the ground, so it is not dragged away into a crater. If all has gone right, the probe is then left alone, silent in an almost entirely unexplored world upon which humans have only ever dreamed of stepping foot.