Fort Worth Museum of Science and History
On Feb. 18, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History will have a virtual watch party, as NASA’s Perseverance rover makes its descent to the surface of Mars.
It’s hard to imagine that hurtling above our heads right now at almost 49,000 mph is NASA’s largest and most technologically advanced rover justly named Perseverance.
On Feb. 18, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (FWMSH) will have a virtual watch party, hosted by astronomers Dr. Doug Roberts and Dr. Morgan Rehnberg, as NASA’s Perseverance rover makes the perilous and dramatic seven-minute descent to the surface of Mars after spending almost eight months in space.
To celebrate the landing, students who are part of the FWMSH Little Scholars Program are invited to the museum to participate in a host of educational activities. The museum will also be adding Mars-specific projects to an already extensive suite of videos on its YouTube channel for children and their families to do at home. Finally, all interested parties will have the opportunity to partake in a livestream Q&A with Roberts and Rehnberg until approximately half an hour before the rover is expected to land on the Jezero Crater at 2:55 p.m. Central Standard Time. Participants will then be encouraged to join NASA’s live landing broadcast on YouTube.
“Because of the way the orbits line up, we can only send things from Earth to Mars every 26 months,” Rehnberg said in an interview. “We don’t have a lot on the surface, so it’s incredibly exciting anytime we have the chance to land something on the surface.”
Perseverance is not making this harrowing journey alone, however, but is accompanied by a drone — the first flying object to be sent to another planet. Once it reaches the Martian surface, perseverance will be joining NASA’s Curiosity rover and InSight lander already on the planet.
“Curiosity wasn’t equipped with the right tools to find evidence of life. Its goal was to find water," Rehnberg said. "Now what we’re doing with Perseverance is sending a rover with the tools necessary to find any evidence of life which might be there.”
Just as Curiosity paved the path for its successor, Perseverance will be preparing the way for future human exploration on Mars.
