Part of the Mars 2020 mission team
Part of the Mars 2020 mission team
A year ago, on 17 July 2019, several hundred engineers, technicians, scientists and managers involved in the Mars 2020 mission gathered for a group picture in front of the main building at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Mars 2020, with the rover Perseverance and the helicopter drone Ingenuity, is one of the most complex projects in the history of Mars exploration, if not the Solar System. JPL in northwest Los Angeles looks back on a great tradition of epoch-making missions built and operated there for NASA, such as the first Mars landings in 1976 with Viking 1 and 2 or the large space probes Voyager, Galileo or Cassini. The predecessor of Mars 2020, the rover Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, was also built at JPL and has been controlled from there ever since.
