New footage released Feb. 22 shows the Perseverance rover's entry, descent and landing on Mars. "We're going to be taking more images of Mars, we're going to be shooting lasers with the SuperCam instrument, we're going to be recording audio with our microphone, and eventually, soon in near future, we are going to deploy our helicopter, and do the first powered flight on Mars," Sridhar said. Sridhar said it's important that the mission is happening despite the COVID pandemic. "NASA missions are obviously trying to explore and answer the fundamental questions and Perseverance is also trying to seek that, and eventually answer the question, was there life on Mars, was that was their life outside, Earth, and it was definitely a tough period for us during COVID and for everyone else around the globe," he said. "And that's why I love the name of Perseverance because we persevered through the pandemic and there was a paradigm shift, we learned a lot how to do engineering remotely. And we went through all that we learned and now we are successful on Mars and it's a great achievement for humankind."