Countdown to Mars: A Story of Perseverance
From NASA Documentaries · 2021
22 min3rd4th5th6thScience
Summary
Follows NASA's Perseverance rover from launch to its nail-biting 'seven minutes of terror' landing in Mars's Jezero Crater in February 2021. A short, high-energy documentary on how engineers design a spacecraft to land itself safely on another planet.
Viewer safety
All ages
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Teaching resources
Discussion questions
Discussion
"Countdown to Mars" shows the tense final minutes of landing a rover on another planet.
- Why do engineers call the landing 'seven minutes of terror'?
- The rover had to land itself, with no one steering it. Why couldn't people on Earth do it live?
- What might scientists hope to learn by sending a rover to Mars?
Quick work-a-long
Vocabulary: rover, landing, engineer, test, signal delay.
Try it: Design on paper a way to safely drop an egg (your 'rover') from a height. Label the parts and explain how you would test it — just like NASA tests a landing.