WASHINGTON (AFP) – Nasa confirmed on Thursday (Feb 18) that the Mars 2020 spacecraft carrying the Perseverance rover had entered the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

“We have confirmation of entry interface” said operations lead Swati Mohan.

The risky, autonomously guided landing phase lasts about seven minutes, and it takes more than 11 minutes for a radio signal to reach Earth.

That means the rover is already on the surface, but it is not yet known whether it crashed or landed successfully.

The vessel careened into the Martian atmosphere at 20,000kmh, protected by its heat shield.

It was then expected to deploy a supersonic parachute the size of a Little League field, before firing up an eight-engined jetpack to slow its descent even further, before eventually lowering the rover carefully to the ground on a set of cables.

The landing site, measuring 7.7km by 6.6km, places the rover at the site of an ancient river delta that could harbor signs of fossilized microbial life.

Nasa scientists will follow the progress of Perseverance’s descent by listening for simple tones from the craft, and from data it relays to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The crater is “absolutely treacherous for landing,” Allen Chen, lead engineer for the landing stage said on Thursday.

“There’s a cliff wall that’s about 200 feet tall that runs right through the middle of the landing site.

“There are craters full of sand that if we landed in them we would not be able to drive out of. And there are there rocks to the east, actually all over the place, rock fields – that would be a bad day for us if we were to land on them.”

Perseverance has new landing technologies up its sleeve to help it navigate the landing with greater precision, including the “Terrain Relative Navigation” that uses a special camera to identify surface features and compare them to an onboard map.

Conditions are dynamic and there is always a chance no signals make it back – but that does not necessarily mean landing failed, because the spacecraft is performing all its maneuvers by itself.

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