I had every intention of getting actual work done yesterday afternoon. Instead I spent it hunched over my laptop at the kitchen table with NASA TV open in one tab and a Slack channel full of coworkers typing "omg omg omg" in the other, watching a car-sized robot try to land itself on Mars without any human able to do a thing about it once it started.
Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater at 3:55pm Eastern yesterday, and if you didn't watch it live, you missed something genuinely great. Not great in the vague marketing sense, great in the specific sense that a piece of hardware built by people I'll never meet flew 293 million miles, hit the top of Mars's atmosphere at something like 12,000 miles an hour, and seven minutes later was sitting still on the ground taking pictures. The whole descent sequence is delayed by radio lag (it takes about 11 minutes for a signal to cross from Mars to Earth right now), so by the time mission control even knew the spacecraft had entered the atmosphere, the rover itself was already either safely parked or a very expensive crater. Nobody on Earth could do anything but watch numbers scroll by and hope. JPL calls this "seven minutes of terror" and it is not an exaggeration for marketing purposes, it's just accurate.
The part that actually got me wasn't the science, it was Swati Mohan's voice calling out the milestones. Parachute deploy, heat shield separation, "sky crane" fully deployed, culminating in "Touchdown confirmed, Perseverance is safe on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life." The control room in Pasadena lost it, people jumping out of chairs in masks (they're all sitting distanced, obviously, still very much a pandemic in there), and I'll admit I got a little choked up watching a room full of strangers hug their own elbows because they couldn't hug each other.
Small thing I want to mention because nobody else will: those JPL mission polos. Every landing team gets a custom-designed shirt for their mission, and this one had a little rover silhouette and mission patch stitched on, and there's a whole tradition around it going back decades. I don't know why but there's something I find deeply charming about a bunch of the smartest aerospace engineers on the planet also caring enough to coordinate a dress code. Meanwhile I'm three Zoom calls deep most days in the same gray hoodie. Different priorities, I guess.
The first images came down within minutes, low-res, black and white, one with a dusty lens cap edge visible in the corner, the wheel and rocky ground beneath it. Not glamorous. But it's real, current, taken-yesterday footage of another planet, and there's a difference between knowing that intellectually and actually seeing the timestamp on the file. NASA says better color images are coming in the next few days once they run through the full system checkout, and Perseverance is carrying a small helicopter named Ingenuity strapped to its belly that they're eventually going to try flying, which would be the first powered flight on another world if it works. That's still weeks away, they're not rushing it.
The rover itself got its name the normal NASA way, through a student essay contest, a seventh grader from Virginia named Alexander Mather picked "Perseverance" out of something like 28,000 entries back in 2020, beating out names like "Vision" and "Tenacity." Feels like an understatement now, but I guess that's the job of a mission name, to be underlined by whatever actually happens.
I don't really have a grand point to make about any of this. I just think it's worth saying, on a blog that's mostly me complaining about software updates and phone battery life, that yesterday afternoon a group of humans landed a nuclear-powered laboratory on another planet using a parachute, retrorockets, and a sky crane that lowered the rover on cables like something out of a heist movie, and it worked on the first try, live, with the whole thing running on pre-programmed logic because there was no time to wait for our permission. Everything else in tech this week is going to feel a little smaller by comparison, and that's fine by me.