NASA’s live landing broadcast on Thursday begins at 2:15 p.m. EST
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I’m hoping Perseverance lands safely. I’m really looking forward over the next few months to the results of its mission as they unfold — searching for signs of life.
Even though it will only be searching for the fossilized remains of billion-year-old pond scum (stromatolites) on an equally old lakebed river delta, that finding would be the biggest scientific discovering of a lifetime. Solid, irrefutable proof of life on Mars (even ancient pond scum) would be strong evidence suggesting that life occurs wherever an opportunity exists for it to develop.
As far as anyone knows, we only have proof of life on Earth. It might just be a unique, one-off thing that only happened here due to some freak occurrence. But if primitive life, at one time, also existed on Mars when its climate was warmer and wetter, it almost certainly has occurred many trillions of times throughout the universe. That would suggest that somewhere out there, life could have evolved, as it did here, into complex intelligent life and that we’re likely not alone.
Sorry for the pedantic rant, but this is the sort of thing that I really love.
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Don’t be sorry 
I get it. I can’t wait to see what they find as well.
As Carl Sagan said " The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space."
Yes - can’t wait for the Landing excellent opportunity to delve further into the history of the planet.
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Here’s to hoping intelligent life evolved somewhere in this vast universe.
I always figured if so, they are smart enough to leave this place alone.
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About 90 minutes until they start coverage
The mundane aspects of the surface of another planet, like Mars, is something that intrigues me to no end.
Much of the surface of Mars, minus any vegetation, and with the addition of a pink sky, looks very much like certain areas of southern Utah were I grew up — miles and miles of nothing but barren red sandstone, hills and cliffs.
Even so, it’s an entirely different planet that’s many millions of miles away and where absolutely no one has ever been. To see that it is, in so many ways, similar to here and yet so radically different in other ways, is amazing — at least to me.
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Waiting for the full landing video. They said they’d post it from upper atmosphere but it would take a few hours to download
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Thanks!
When I saw the video the other day, that pattern on the parachute caught my eye as being just random-looking enough to have been deliberate in some way or another. Those geeky engineers!
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Live Webcam from Mars
I kept waiting for the jumpscare on that one.
LOL.
(It’s not a direct NASA feed.)