Nasa Mars launch: Space agency defies coronavirus and earthquake to launch Perseverance rover to red planet – as it happened
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Your support makes all the difference.Nasa is heading to Mars after launching a rocket from Earth today.
The space agency is sending its Perseverance rover – its strongest and smartest explorer visitor to the surface yet – to look for evidence of ancient life on the Martian surface.
The rover is carrying a helicopter that will make the first ever flight on another planet, as well as a variety of tools that will allow it to explore the surface looking for evidence of past alien activity.
The rocket is the third to take off for Mars this month, as space agencies leap through the brief window in which the planets align to allow an efficient trip to the Red Planet. The UAE launched its Hope orbiter last week, followed by the Chinese Questions to Heaven spacecraft shortly after.
Please allow a moment for the live blog to load.
Nasa engineers are talking about Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment – or MOXIE. That's a piece of kit that's on board the rover, which is a test of a plan to be able to create oxygen out of the mostly carbon dioxide that makes up Mars' atmosphere. If that works, it could be key to future exploration, since humans will need oxygen as a resource if they're going to spend any time on Mars.
On the Nasa live feed, there's a full scale mock-up of the rover, which gives you a sense of its size.
Sue Horne, head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency, told the PA news agency: "We will continue to explore the heavens so long as the moon, Mars and the myriad celestial bodies beyond spark fires in our curiosity and if Perseverance helps us find life on Mars, it will be a defining moment for humankind.
"The UK Space Agency is supporting these endeavours to explore our solar system with leading-edge robotics, and it is a credit to our expertise in the UK that researchers from both Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum are part of the international crack team working on this Nasa mission."
Perseverance has been up for 40 minutes now.
It looks something like, as it flies around Earth. It's currently coasting, as it goes for its second burn, which will get it on its way to Mars.
There we go: the Centaur Engine is beginning its second burn.
"This is the burn that gets us really moving in the direction we need to go," says one of the engineers on the broadcast. This is the one that accelerate the spacecraft enough so that it's ready to get out of the Earth's orbit and send it off on its way to Mars.
The burn is over, and the spacecraft is heading in the right direction. In a few minutes, it can drop that booster, since its job has been done, and the rest of the spacecraft will head off to Mars.
The spacecraft is starting to roll, ready to drop the engine off the bottom. Spinning around allows the Mars 2020 spacecraft to be stable when the booster drops off the back.
And separation has happened! (No video of it – but that could be coming.)
On the live stream, they're noting that there's none of the hollering or high-fives that would normally accompany big moments like this. Because of the coronavirus outbreak, everyone is being safe by not shouting or touching each other – instead they've been doing "air high fives".
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