Another spectacular "seven minutes of terror" concluded flawlessly yesterday as NASA's Perseverance rover touched down in Jezero Crater. The engineering required to execute the sky-crane manoeuvre never ceases to blow my mind, no matter how many times I watch the animations.

What makes Percy so incredibly exciting is its primary objective: directly searching for signs of ancient microbial life.

Jezero Crater was once a massive lake fed by a river delta billions of years ago. If life ever existed on Mars, the sediments here are exactly where we should be looking. It has been a brilliant month for space exploration, with both the UAE's Hope and China's Tianwen-1 also successfully entering Martian orbit.

Mars 2020: Perseverance Rover

NASA: How we land on Mars