If you're a space nerd, and I'm guessing a lot of you are if you're listening to Wild Thing,

February 18, 2021 was a big day. At 355 p.m. Eastern Time, after more than six months and 300 million miles,

NASA's Perseverance Rover landed on Mars to begin its search for signs of ancient life.

Now, we've been captivated by the idea of life on Mars for centuries,

and the planet itself has long fascinated scientists like Sarah Stewart-Johnson.

She's a planetary scientist at Georgetown University

and a visiting scientist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

She's also the author of The Sirens of Mars, searching for life on another world.

Sarah participated on the science teams for NASA's Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity Rovers.

And while she's not directly involved with perseverance,

she knew exactly what everyone was feeling on the day this newest rover hit Martian soil.

Terrified, excited, hopeful, you know, just a million different emotions.

I think I was feeling maybe slightly less worried than I was when curiosity was landing.

That was the very first time we had ever

tried this sky crane technology, which is kind of like sending a rover down to the surface

attached to a jet pack. It goes down, the parachute deploys, the rover drops down on a cords, and it gets put down lightly on the surface and then the sky crane

powers away and crashes in the distance and we'd done that before and it had worked um but there were

new there were new things this time around that had never been tried before.

And so it's always a little bit scary.

And it was just flawless.

It was within five meters of that target after a 292 million mile journey from Earth.

It was really incredible.

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