‘I’m safe on Mars,’ the Perseverance rover tweeted on February 18. ‘Perseverance will get you anywhere.’

Then, sending back its first images of the Red Planet, it tweeted: ‘Hello, world. My first look at my forever home.’

‘Percy’, as NASA calls it, had just been threw the ‘Seven Minutes of Terror’ during landing. It kept its cool under stress (with the aid of an aeroshell heat-resistant sheild) but the mission-control team were in a sweat. It was an extremely risky oporation and Percy could have been distroyed.

The rover streeked into the Martian atmosfere at more than 19,000km per hour, then had to slow to 2.7km/h to land safely using a parashute. Radio signels take 11 minutes to travel between Earth and Mars, so for the 7 minutes of landing Percy had to operate without any help from NASA – and they didn’t know it had survived until 11 minutes after touchdown. Then came the cheers, tears and claping.

Perseverance is not alone in its mission. NASA’s Curiosity rover is already on Mars, the United Arab Emarates’ Hope probe is in orbit, and China’s Tianwen-1 is also in orbit and will send its rover to the surface in May or June.