SETI Live: Mars 2020 – The Perseverance Rover Landing!

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Join us live on February 18 between  11:15am and 12:45pm PST to follow the landing and hear from engineers and scientists directly involved in the mission. Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, and Beth Johnson, a social media expert at the SETI Institute, will host this special SETI Live.

Scheduled Guests:
Adrian Brown, NASA HQ, Deputy Program Scientist, Mars2020
Janice Bishop, SETI Institute, Senior Research Scientist
Elena Amador-French, JPL, Systems Engineer and Planetary Scientist
David Deamer, UCSC, Research Professor
Joby Hollis, JPL, Postdoctoral Scholar
Pascal Lee, SETI Institute, Planetary Scientist
Casey Moore, Maxar, Space environments specialist
Troy Hudson, JPL, Instrument System Engineer
David Stafford, JPL, Mechanical Integration Engineer
AND MORE . . .

Guests will discuss their roles with Mars 2020 and Perseverance. These include the site selection, the goal of the mission, some of the instruments onboard the rover, and of course the future of Mars exploration. Remember, landing on Mars is hard, so we need your support.

What to expect:
Perseverance is scheduled to touch down on Mars on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, at approximately 12:55 p.m. PST (3:55 p.m. EST). During landing, the rover plunges through the thin Martian atmosphere, with the heat shield first, at a speed of over 12,000 mph (about 20,000 kph). A parachute and powered descent slow the rover down to about 2 mph (three-fourths of a meter per second) – this is sometimes referred to as “7 minutes of terror.” A large sky crane then lowers the rover on three bridle cords to land softly on six wheels. Landing on Mars is hard!

During the landing, we will share NASA’s stream so we can all watch together.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline/landing/