Recently, Mars welcomed yet another visitor from Earth, named Perseverance. If you don’t already know, Perseverance is the third robot we’ve sent to Mars and is specifically designed to collect evidence of life. It has a variety of tools to do so, and in this article, we’re going to talk about one of them!

First of all, what did Perseverance need to accomplish to be successful? Well, it had to slow down from 12,100 mph to zero in the span of seven minutes, so that the rover wouldn’t completely explode upon reentry.