Cartoons: NASA Perseverance rover lands safely on Mars

CLICK HERE if you’re viewing on a mobile device.

Perseverance, the ninth and largest, most advanced ever spacecraft sent by NASA to land on Mars, tweeted its first video Monday. The clip featured multiple angles of the robot’s landing, captured by its 25 cameras.

NASA rover Perseverance lands safely on Mars

In case you missed it, the United States on Thursday landed Perseverance on the surface of the red planet, Associated Press reported. The roaming droid’s seven-month journey ended in “seven minutes of terror” that involved auto-piloting its own entry, descent and landing near the Jezero Crater.

Within minutes the six-wheeled rover, nicknamed Percy, was tweeting photos that gave everyone back on Earth a window into a 5-by-4-mile strip on an ancient river delta full of pits, cliffs and fields of rock. Ground controllers at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena sent the plutonium-powered vehicle there in search of any evidence that life once thrived on the planet, according to AP.

It will take a week for the rover to start driving as officials check its systems. Percy then will use its 7-foot arm to drill into the surface it’s roaming to collect rock samples for signs of life, a process the rover will continue over the next two years. Once it has gathered three to four dozen chalk-sized samples, a separate fetch rover will retrieve the materials. By 2031, the space agency aims to have those samples on their way back to Earth on another rocket ship.

NASA timed the robot’s approximately 300-million-mile voyage to take advantage of a close alignment of Earth and Mars. Spacecraft from China and the United Arab Emirates also swung into orbit around Mars last week.

For more political cartoons, CLICK HERE.