Where would you find the tallest mountain in the solar system? Nepal, Mars, the Moon or Titan. Scientsts believe that Olympus Mons, a volcano on Mars is the tallest mountain in the solar system.
Since the 1960s, NASA has launched more than 20 missions to the red planet. Not all of them have been successful. As the project manager for the newest Rover mission puts it, landing on Mars is hard. But that hasn't deterred the scientists behind the $2.7 billion Perseverance Project. The Rover is set to touch down on Mars in 20 days. It's the biggest, heaviest and most advanced machine of its kind that NASA's ever built and scientists will be relying completely on its computer systems to get the landing right. Mars is more than 292 million miles away. It takes 10 and a half minutes for radio signals on earth to reach a rover on Mars and the landing process occurs over seven minutes. So if anything goes wrong as Perseverance gets close to the surface, there won't be enough time for NASA to correct it.
Of course the organization has done this before with other landers and rovers. And assuming Perseverance gets to Mars, oK, it will start taking pictures and exploring the planets geology and climate. The rover is also carrying a helicopter named Ingenuity. The $23 million aircraft isn't collecting any scientific info. It's there just to see if helicopter flight is feasible for future missions. While it does that the Perseverance Rover is expected to cover 15 miles in its year's long journey.
