Watch the astonishing video of Perseverance landing on Mars.

The rover captured this image with one of its navigational cameras on Feb. 22.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

For the first time ever, you can watch a rover landing on Mars. And it's epic on many levels.

Human beings have been dropping machines on Mars since the 1970s: landers that parachuted to the surface, rovers that were destroyed during landing, and later rovers that survived their landings inside giant, bouncing cushions of airbags. Now powerful skycranes lower NASA rovers to the surface. But in all that time, all those spectacular successes and failures have taken place out of sight on another world. That changed with Perseverance.

NASA outfitted the Perseverance rover and its landing vehicle, which arrived on the Red Planet Feb. 18, with a collection of high-quality, high-speed video cameras to capture the "seven minutes of terror," as engineers refer to the plunge to the Martian surface. The cameras were set up to offer viewers front-row seats to the final two chapters of the trucklike machine's plunge from solar orbit onto the Martian dirt: the parachute and the skycrane.

The video shows the rover's landing vehicle popping off its heat shield so it can "see" the ground during landing to time its parachute deployment. The metal disk falls away, revealing the long drop that still separates the $2.7 billion, nuclear-powered rover from the ground. Another camera shows the parachute unfurling, a sheet of fabric tasked with slowing the descent from 940 mph (1,512 km/h) to 190 mph (306 km/h) in two minutes. Then, the lander drops away from the parachute the robotic pilot took on its toughest challenge: Identifying and maneuvering toward a safe landing site. Finally, the skycrane hovers 65 feet above the Martian surface, kicking up a dust storm as it lowers a gently swaying rover on long cables to the ground before flying away.

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Rafi joined Live Science in 2017. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of journalism. You can find his past science reporting at Inverse, Business Insider and Popular Science, and his past photojournalism on the Flash90 wire service and in the pages of The Courier Post of southern New Jersey.