NASA's Perseverance rover to explore mysteries of Mars

After a seven-month journey, NASA's Perseverance rover prepares to touch down on Mars on Thursday after first negotiating a risky landing procedure that will mark the start of its multi-year search for signs of ancient microbial life. "We know Mars had water at one point, we know that it was habitable, it could have had life at one point. That's why we're going back and looking for it," Perseverance deputy project manager, Jennifer Trosper, tells AFPTV.

NASA Acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk remarks on the possibility of having astronauts on Mars at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shortly after the Perseverance rover landed on the red planet.

The USA's Perseverance rover has successfully landed on Mars with a helicopter called Ingenuity strapped to its belly. The Mars 2020 mission is seen as a first step towards bringing samples of Martian rock back to Earth.

The Perseverance rover has sent back the first audio clip from the Red Planet — capturing a faint Martian breeze. The longer video shows the remarkable moment the rover touched down on the surface.

Moving a few meters back and forth, the short trip was a mobility test for the Perseverance rover. It comes just two weeks after touching down on the red planet.

"We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet!" says lead engineer MiMi Aung to her team as NASA successfully flew the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.

The conversion could pave the way to sustaining human life on Mars. It marks the first time that a resource was extracted from another planet for use by humans.

Ingenuity, the first ever human-built aircraft to fly on another planet, has gotten a reprieve after successfully completing four out of five planned flights.

After the successful splashdown of the SpaceX capsule with four astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) off the coast of Florida, NASA hailed at a press conference an "incredible day".

NASA is launching two new missions to Venus at the end of the decade to find out why the planet became "an inferno-like world." The missions will take place from 2028 to 2030.

The Perseverance rover is on a mission to hunt for signs of past life on Mars. But something went wrong in its first attempt to gather rock samples.