Landing on Mars is incredibly hard, with fewer than half of missions succeeding. On Thursday evening, Nasa’s Perseverance rover will face the dreaded “seven minutes of terror” as it makes its way down to the surface of the red planet. The spacecraft will have to decelerate from more than 30 times the speed of sound to stationary, while it’s heated to 1,300°C by friction with the upper atmosphere. The delay in signal transmission means it will have to do this autonomously, without being steered from Earth.

The landing isn’t just crucial for the mission itself. Some 3,000km from the landing site, another Nasa probe – Mars InSight – will “listen” to the landing. Designed for seismic exploration, InSight’s job is to detect “marsquakes”. While it has successfully detected several such events, scientists have been unable to work out their details, such as how large they were or where they occurred. That’s because they have no known seismic event to compare with. Luckily, the landing of Perseverance could provide just that – a point of reference. We know exactly where the rover will land, how much it weighs and what its landing velocity will be.

Back on Earth, the UK government has now given 15 million of the people most vulnerable to COVID-19 at least once dose of vaccine, but it needs to think carefully about who should be prioritised next. And we hear from some of the researchers who made a fascinating series of discoveries to confirm that parts of Stonehenge first stood 140 miles away in Wales.

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