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From Wondry, I'm Stephen Johnson and this is American Innovations.

The countdown to Mars is ticking away as the Perseverance Rover continues its 7-month journey to the Red Planet.

After it lands on February 18th, Perseverance will traverse the barren landscape of Mars to collect and store rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth.

It's the next step in our long journey to understand Mars and someday, perhaps even to colonize it.

Every Mars Rover mission is in itself almost a miracle.

Roughly half of all attempts to send probes to Mars have ended in failure.

For Mars mission to succeed, every person involved has to be at the top of his or her game.

There's no room for error when you're dealing with a multi-billion dollar piece of equipment and years of preparation.

So, this week, we're welcoming two guests on the show who can give us an insider's perspective on all things Mars Rover.

Dr. Anita Sengupda, a former NASA engineer who worked on parachute systems for the Curiosity Rover and Dr. Matt Smith, a systems engineer and flight director on the Perseverance mission with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

We'll start with Dr. Anita Sengupda.

Dr. Sengupda, thank you so much for joining us on American Innovations.

Thank you so much for having me this morning.

So, these days, you're partially in academia, but for many years, you worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

And we've just been listening to this whole three-part series about various missions to Mars, including the Curiosity mission.

You were focused on what are called EDL systems, which are entry, descent, and landing.

I think just to set the stage, be interested in to hear what that kind of project involves and what are the kind of main issues

you're wrestling with when you're trying to create something along those lines.

So, yeah, entry, descent, landing, or EDL for short is a phase of a mission, which is going to do a planetary entry.

Sometimes that can be through a body which doesn't have an atmosphere, but in the case of Mars or the case of Earth, that's reentry through a planetary atmosphere.

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