Mars rover landing live: Follow Nasa Perseverance as it lands on red planet

The seven minutes of terror have begun.

Perseverance has crossed into the atmosphere, and is now flying down towards Mars. The seven most dangerous minutes of its mission have now begun.

(The “atmospheric entry” is a somewhat arbitrary part of the sky, but it does denote the point at which everything gets more dangerous.)

The vehicle is now going to be like a “bullet”, Nasa notes – everything goes very quickly from here, as the spacecraft hurtles towards Mars.

In about six minutes, it will enter the atmosphere – the beginning of those “seven minutes of terror”. The spacecraft will go very fast through the atmosphere, heating up and undergoing the first of its big challenges as its heat shield protects it from those blazing temperatures.

The spacecraft will also go quiet during this time, and even the “heartbeat tones” will switch off at points, because they won’t be able to make it through the hot plasma.

(Again, it’s worth remembering that we’re on a delay of over 11 minutes – that’s caused by the time it takes for the messages to make it through space.)

Here’s a Nasa illustration that shows how that process of hurtling into the atmosphere and decelerating should look:

The Perseverance rover has been carried over its almost 300-million-mile journeyby the cruise stage, that is the spacecraft that has taken it through space, ensuring that it safely travels through space and is pointing the right way.

But they have now split apart, ready for the entry into the atmosphere and the descent down before landing.

The vehicle is now on its own, turning itself towards Mars and ready to drop into the atmosphere.

The transmitter that has been sending messages back to Earth is about to get switched off, meaning that the complex digital information it has been sending back will stop coming.

Instead, Nasa will be relying on tones, which it likens to a “flashlight” – still a signal coming back from the rover, but just a simple one telling us that it’s still around, rather than the more complex digital one that gives engineers more rich information.

With less than an hour to go, mission controllers are speaking to each other before the EDL – entry, descent and landing – team begin their work properly.

They note that it is a very unusual landing, and that it’s not even been clear that everyone has been in the same room at the same time during the lead-up to the launch. Some staff are still working from home over the internet.

The EDL team also thank the cruise team for all the work they’ve done guiding the spacecraft to Mars over the months it has taken. “Thanks for literally and figuratively putting us in the place to succeed.”