7 Minutes of Terror

February 25, 2021

Before last week, it had been more than 8 years since the last official 7 Minutes of Terror. That's what scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory call the time it takes for a rover in the final stages of its travel to Mars to plunge through the atmosphere and reach the surface. Last Thursday, millions of us watched on NASA TV as our sixth rover, Perseverance, successfully landed after a 6-and-a-half month journey.

During the 7 Minutes of Terror, a rover is completely on its own—the 5-minute transmission delay makes it impossible to control from Earth, so a successful landing takes years of planning and calculation and testing. So much can go wrong, but last week everything went right, and those of us in the viewing audience got to experience a bit of the joy we saw erupting on the live feed from JPL. It was a triumph that was undampened despite the masks and social distancing, and some of the scientists remarked that they hadn't felt like that since Curiosity, the last rover, touched down in 2012.

Everyone has had at least some experience of the 7 Minutes of Terror. You've worked at something for months or years, and it all boils down to that last minute... or that 7 minutes, or 2 hours, or whatever... that will judge your efforts a success or failure. If it works, it's a win... and if it fails, well, then what? What's your next move? Give up? Persevere? Reinvent your mission? Our response to failure says more about us, and what's in store for our future, than our response to success. Last week's landing was an unqualified success, though, and that was fortunate not just for the engineers and researchers at JPL, but for us all.

The rovers' mission is to gather evidence for everything that we'll need ultimately to send humans to Mars in person. The people who will make the trip first are already alive. Maybe those kids watched Perseverance's landing with rapt attention and started planning their own secret mission to be one of the first humans to reach another planet. Or maybe they were just sitting in your basement playing video games and weren't paying attention at all. Regardless, they live in a world that keeps piling up evidence that achievement is possible. That's what will keep us all moving in the right direction... to Mars, sure, but more immediately, through this last leg of our journey through the pandemic.

Perseverance is alive on the surface of Earth.

—Deb