Extract from ABC News
After a nail-biting "seven minutes of terror", NASA's newest rover has arrived safely on Mars.
As NASA mission control watched in silence, the rover perfected a complex series of manoeuvres to touch down in a textbook landing at 7:55am (AEDT).
Seconds after landing was confirmed it sent back its first image from the surface.
"Now we're on the ground, now the fun really starts," NASA's Planetary Science director Lori Glaze said.
Perseverance is the fifth rover NASA has successfully landed on Mars since 1997.
It joins two other NASA spacecraft — the Curiosity rover and the InSight lander — on the surface of the Red Planet.
But with a quest to find out whether life ever existed on Mars and to return rocks back to Earth, it is very different to any mission that has come before it.
"This mission is amazing on its own, but it is part of bigger exploration plans that not only involve exploring Mars for past life, but preparing for future missions to Mars," NASA's acting administrator Steve Jurczyk said.
"This is one step along the way to accomplish that goal. And it is a major step."
Here's what happens next.
When will we get more first images?
If you think the first image is spectacular, that's nothing compared to what is about to come down.
Kitted out with several camera and microphones, Perseverance is the first rover to capture the sights and sounds of a landing on Mars.
"Over the next few days as we take down all the images and microphone data from the descent, it's going to take us on that descent," Dr Glaze said.
"We're going to get to experience just exactly what that was like."
The first high-resolution image that will come back in the next 24 hours will be an image taken from the rover as it descends.
Then get ready for the high-res movies and panorama shots early next week.
How will Perseverance get started?
One of the first jobs will be to unfurl parts of the rover, such as the arm and antenna, and establish direct communication with Earth.
Engineers will then spend the next few days checking the rover and checking the instruments on board.
Then they will start uploading all the software it needs to do its job.
Around day four, they'll do the first drive across to check out the rocks about 5 metres away that you can see in the initial photo.
Then they'll work out where to drive to set down the helicopter.
After flying the helicopter sometime next month, they'll upgrade the software again and get ready for the science program to begin.
The entire set-up phase will last around 90 Mars days (about 148 Earth days) to complete.
"For the first few weeks and months, we'll probably run on Mars time," said David Flannery, a Mars2020 mission planner based at the Queensland University of Technology.
"The operation process, which might take 10 hours in any given day, is in a sliding window that follows daylight hours on Mars.
Luckily, for Dr Flannery, daylight hours on Mars currently coincide with Australian time zones, but eventually the hours will shift.
"In the beginning it's good for me, but slowly we'll migrate around and that will continue happening because the Martian day is 30 minutes longer than the Earth day," he said.
Where will the rover go?
Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater, which scientists believe was a large ancient lake.
Deposits of minerals indicative of a landscape transformed by water can be seen across the lake and delta from space.
The landing site is in a flat spot near rocks and the cliffs of the delta in the south-east corner of the crater, said Allen Chen, who led the mission landing.
"We found a parking lot and hit it," he said.
Now it has landed, the scientists will work out the exact route the rover will take as it trundles across the landscape for the next couple of years.
"We've come up with a bunch of notional traverses, paths we could take through Jezero Crater during the prime mission," Dr Flannery said.
The route in this image begins at the bottom of cliffs at the base of a delta.
The rover will then move across the delta towards what was possibly a shoreline, before climbing up the 610-metre crater rim. It will take about two Earth years (one Mars' year) to complete half this journey.
What about the helicopter?
While the scientists are plotting the path Perseverance will take, they'll also work out the best place to set down Ingenuity and take it for a spin sometime in the middle of March.
It could take up to 10 Mars days, but it really depends upon where NASA finds a helisite, Perseverance's deputy project manager Jennifer Trosper said.
Then it will take another 10 days to get the helicopter out from underneath the rover and move the rover away.
"It's always hard to estimate exactly when thing happen, but we'll be flying the helicopter in the [northern hemisphere] spring," she said.
If it succeeds, it will be the first time a powered craft has buzzed across a planet other than Earth.
After everything checks out and they've attempted flying the drone, the full science mission will kick in.
"I'll be spending a lot of my time trying to drive consensus within the team as to exactly where we go and then, probably after three months or so, we'll start to get into our major science programs," Dr Flannery said.
How long will the rover work for?
The primary mission is slated to last until April 2023, but like many rover missions, it could go for longer.
Once the rover is fully up and running, the scientists will make decisions about where to go and what rocks to look at based on the data coming down from each of the seven instruments.
Over the next two years, they'll also make decisions about which rocks to take samples from to eventually bring back to Earth.
Crunching that data will be a 24-hour job split between JPL in California and QUT in Brisbane.
"We will always have this problem that we need to rapidly analyse all sorts of data that comes back," Dr Flannery said.
"The instruments are capable of generating huge amounts of data and we have bottlenecks throughout the system, such as satellites orbiting Mars that need to relay the data back.
"So we're having to come up with innovative techniques to help us get that job done efficiently."
When will the rocks come to Earth?
Perseverance is the first of several missions in an ambitious joint plan involving NASA and the European Space Agency to bring samples of Mars to Earth.
Over the next two years, Perseverance will get the best samples and stash them on the surface of Mars.
Then a future mission will land on the Red Planet sometime around 2026 to collect the 40 samples from where they were left across Jezero Crater.
All the samples will be put on a rocket that will blast off Mars and take them into orbit, where they will be transferred to a spacecraft to bring them back to Earth.
If everything goes to plan, the aim is to return the samples sometime in the 2030s.
Every step of the plan, from selecting the samples, to getting them back off Mars in pristine condition, will be incredibly challenging, Dr Flannery said.
Mad about Mars? Watch Catalyst's two-part special Mars: Our Second Home? on Tuesday, February 23 and Tuesday, March 2 at 8.30pm.
In episode 1, astrophysicist Professor Tamara Davis and astronomer Greg Quicke meet the Australian scientists on a mission to solve the many challenges of putting people on the Red Planet.
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