Perseverance’s Landiversary: Celebrating a Year of Exploration with NASA’s Mars Rover

It’s been one busy year for NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover! Join us in the Mars Yard at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as we celebrate the one-year anniversary of the robotic explorer's historic Mars landing. We’ll be chatting with members of the Mars 2020 team who helped make the moment happen, and they’ll tell us what’s next for the rover. Speakers: Swati Mohan – Perseverance guidance, navigation & control operations lead Rachel Kronyak - Perseverance science operations systems engineer Hosted by: Raquel Villanueva - video producer and commentator Please note that audio falls off between 33:58-34:45. The transcript for this portion is below. Rachel Kronyak: "(The other rovers) are all really far away from Perseverance, so we communicate with the rover using our fleet of satellites that orbit around Mars as, sort of, communications relays. So sometimes we can actually send commands directly to the rover – we call that Direct From Earth – but most of the time when we’re beaming data from Perseverance back to us here on Earth, we use those satellites as a communications relay." Raquel Villanueva: "And Flynn on YouTube wants to know, 'Has Ingenuity continued to scout for Perseverance?'” Rachel Kronyak: “Yes, so like we talked about earlier, Ingenuity is in this really exciting phase that’s called our operations demonstration. So we have been using it as a scout to sort of look at these new terrains that we eventually hope to go to with Perseverance. There are also some areas that are too dangerous for Perseverance to drive through, so that’s why we really like using Ingenuity to sort of get a feel for what these terrains look like from the helicopter’s view."