Whether you're into space exploration, astronomy and stars or not at all, this is something I believe every human should see. Yesterday, NASA unveiled the incredible footage sent by the Perseverance rover over the weekend. The video shows the rover landing on Mars. Let me say that again: the video shows a robot the size of a car autonomously landing on another planet hundreds of millions of kilometres away.

There were a microphone and a total of 4 cameras installed on the EDL (Entry-Descent-Landing) system: one on the back shell looking up at the parachutes (the first stage of landing, right after entering the atmosphere), one on the rover itself, looking down at the ground, and two set up to film the crane process, one on the rover looking up and one on the sky crane looking down at the rover.

It was the first time someone attempted to film a Mars landing, so the team even admitted that whatever images they would receive from Perseverance would be satisfying as they did not know for sure if their systems would work. Unfortunately, they were unable to retrieve any data from the microphone, but they were more than satisfied by the images.

This is stunning, I was definitely not expecting something so clear, so smooth, in color and in such a high definition...

The first clip shows the parachute opening. The different stripes on the chute were set up to help mission control see if any part was damaged or not opening properly.

Then we switch to the Rover Down-Look Camera, where we can see the heat shield (that was protecting the rover from atmosphere entry) falling off as it is no longer needed. This also shows us amazing sky views of the red planet. The angle changes as the rover is trying to direct itself towards its landing zone in Jezero Crater.

As the rover gets closer to the ground, near the 2:43 mark, we can see the sand flying away as the boosters are now relatively close, and then the screen splits and on the left we have the Rover Up-Look and the Descent Stage Down-Look cameras where we can see the craning down of the rover, the last stage before touchdown.

Finally, after the amazing "Touchdown confirmed!" message, we can see the sky crane fly away from the landing zone to go crash/land a few kilometers away.

We had already seen photos of the landing, but this is another level of awesomeness... Perseverance's mission over the next two years is to try to find traces of ancient microbial life on Mars. A very exciting mission, but we can already say that, after only 5 days on Mars, this rover already sent us some pretty satisfying images.

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