On Thursday, NASA’s newest Mars rover, Perseverance, is scheduled to touch down on the surface of the Red Planet following a nail-biting entry and descent sequence vividly known as the “seven minutes of terror.” If all goes according to plan, the car-sized explorer will blast safely down into Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide impact basin that once may have hosted a river delta flooded with water, and possibly life. Over the next year and a half of its primary mission, Perseverance will explore the crater and collect rock samples that…
