Catching Up With Perseverance on Mars

NASA's Curious Universe

Katie Konans

Science

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2026

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

NASA’s robotic explorers are looking for signs of ancient life on Mars. In its five years and counting on the surface of the Red Planet, the Perseverance rover has collected dozens of rock samples, including tantalizing features that could be signs of past life. Scientists want to keep studying Mars. That’s why NASA plans to send a fleet of next-generation helicopter drones and—one day—astronauts. In this episode, catch up on Perseverance’s biggest discoveries with project scientist Katie Stack Morgan and fly along with Håvard Grip, the pilot for the first-ever flight of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter. For more information, visit nasa.gov/perseverance

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're listening to NASA's Curious Universe. I'm your host, Jacob Pinter.
0:08.4	February 18, 2021 was a nail-biter of a day at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
0:16.0	More than 140 million miles away, a capsule was hurtling through the atmosphere of another planet.
0:22.7	Packed inside was a nuclear-powered, car-sized, six-wheeled rover called Perseverance.
0:29.5	Thousands of NASA engineers had spent years designing and building this thing.
0:35.3	The spacecraft had to withstand the long journey to the Martian surface, and then the rover
0:40.0	inside had to survive the harsh environment there.
0:44.9	Katie Stack Morgan is the project scientist for the Perseverance Mars rover, so she was
0:49.8	one of the folks doing the nail biting.
0:52.0	I was watching the landing from my living room in my kitchen,
0:56.1	and we were actually online with our science team because we weren't allowed to co-locate,
1:01.9	because this was during COVID. And so I was watching it on the TV. I was watching my computer,
1:07.5	looking at our team members, and my family was around me.
1:11.4	Now, Katie had watched a Mars landing before for the Curiosity rover, which touched down in 2012,
1:16.9	but that one felt different.
1:18.6	I was a happy-go-lucky grad student back then.
1:21.7	I was just in it for the ride, and I was enjoying, you know, all of the fanfare surrounding
1:26.1	a rover landing.
1:27.7	This time, she was one of the scientists in charge of all the research this rover would do on
1:32.9	Mars for years to come. And for that to happen, first, it had to land safely.
1:39.0	I very much felt like my career was dependent on the successful landing. I had kids now. My family was depending
1:47.5	on this rover to land. And so the stakes felt much higher. This phase of a Mars mission is called
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 23 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Katie Konans, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Katie Konans and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.