WASHINGTON (AP) – After nearly six months of flight, the American Rover “Fortitude” is scheduled to land on Mars today.

The US space agency NASA’s robot, which was launched at the end of July 2020 from Cape Canaveral Spaceport, is believed to be at about 9:30 pm CET with a risky maneuver in a dry lake called the “Jezer Skater” Can touch The site was never investigated.

The nearly $ 2.5 billion (about 2.2 billion euros) expensive NASA Rover “Fixture” (in German: endurance) was designed and manufactured for about eight years and is believed to be the first to discover the marks of earlier microbial life on Mars. Doing as well as searching. Climate and geology of the planet. On board, a robot of about 1,000 kg has 7 scientific instruments, 23 cameras and a laser in the shape of a small car, among other things.

The rover will enable several NASA premieres: for the first time, microphones will be sent to Mars with “firmness”, a small helicopter for the first time and a joint mission for the first time to bring samples back from Earth to Earth. With the European Space Agency Essa.

If “perseverance” lands, it will be the fifth rover that NASA brings to Mars – most recently in 2012 “Curiosity”. Overall, less than half of all Mars missions launched worldwide have been successful so far.

In the past week, the first space probe from the United Arab Emirates and then China successfully orbited the planet. “Al-Amal”, the United Arab Emirates probe, is not supposed to land, plans to land the Chinese spacecraft “Tianwen 1” in two to three months.