Nasa rover Perseverance in historic bid to land on Mars

Primary objective of Perseverance’s two-year, $2.7 billion endeavour is to search for signs of microbes that may have flourished on Mars some 3 billion years ago, about the time life was emerging on Earth

Nasa’s Mars rover Perseverance hurtled into the final stretch of its seven-month journey from Earth en route to a nail-biting landing attempt on Thursday on an ancient, alien lake bed, where scientists hope to find signs of fossilised microbial life.

Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever flown to another world, was headed for a self-guided touchdown inside a vast, rocky basin called Jezero Crater at the edge of a remnant river delta carved into the red planet billions of years ago.

Engineers at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles hope to receive confirmation of the landing, and possibly a first image from the rover, shortly after its arrival, set for 12:55 pm PST (2055 GMT). Those transmissions will be relayed to Earth from one of several satellites already in orbit around Mars.

What makes Jezero Crater’s terrain — deeply etched by long-vanished flows of liquid water — so tantalising to scientists also makes it especially treacherous as a landing site.

“It’s full of the stuff that scientists want to see but stuff that I don’t want to land on,” Al Chen, head of JPL’s descent and landing team, told reporters on Wednesday.