*This illustration from NASA depicts how the Perseverance rover will attempt to land on Mars on Feb. 18. Photo Courtesy of of NASA/JPL-Caltech.*

At 2:30 p.m. on Feb. 18, after an eight month journey, NASA’s Perseverance Rover will attempt to land on Mars.

If successful, the 2,260 lb. vehicle will be the fifth rover to roam the Red Planet. Coverage of the landing begins at 2 p.m. and NASA anticipates that it will last precisely seven and a half minutes.

For Vermonters who are avid space geeks, school students looking for a break during remote learning, or just about anyone looking for a diversion from their daily routine, the timing is perfect.

And while you might hop onto the main NASA feed, there’s a special online Zoom watch party that you can log into in order to watch along with several Vermonters whose side gig prepares them for big moments in space just like this.

They’re NASA Solar System Ambassadors, volunteers and space enthusiasts whose mission is to get the public excited about space exploration that ultimately seeks a better understanding of the origins of human life on Earth.

Vermont has four and Community News Service caught up with two of them a week before the Perseverance landing -- Caleigh Cross, 27, from Stowe, and Cynthia Shelton, 52, from Newport. The pair volunteer with fellow ambassadors Allan Miller, from Shelburne, and Scott Turnbull from Essex Junction. The ambassadors are not engineers. Rather, they are science communicators who receive professional training from NASA and “get to talk with engineers and astronauts” about ongoing discoveries and explorations, says Shelton.

Previous rovers have identified signs that water used to be present on Mars, including a delta that once held a body of water larger than Lake Tahoe called Jezero Crater. NASA’s website details the goals of the current mission. Carrying several new technological instruments and a plate in tribute to healthcare workers, Perseverance will aim to take research one step further to possibly find direct evidence of microbial life and study the geology of Mars in greater detail.

In addition to cameras that will allow Earthlings to watch the landing, the rover hosts powerful imaging instruments crucial to understanding Mars’ past. Cross says that PIXL, an X-ray camera attached to an arm of the rover, can detect the texture of a rock from the distance of a soccer field away. PIXL can identify more than 20 chemical elements in 10 seconds from a single point the size of a grain of sand, according to NASA.

SHERLOC, another high-tech imaging device, uses ultraviolet imaging to scan for organic minerals and molecules. Cross explained that SHERLOC and PIXL, among other tools, will help scientists choose which samples should be returned to Earth for future study.

*A close-up view of SHERLOC, one of the instruments NASA will use to look for signs of past life on Mars. Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.*

Unlike previous missions, Perseverance Rover is equipped with microphones which will allow people listening from Earth to hear the sounds of a Mars landing for the first time in history. Once on the ground, the equipment will help scientists learn about the wind and rocks on Mars.

The rover also will carry the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on its belly -- new technology to test powered flight on another world for the first time.

Although Perseverance seeks to make it possible for human travel and life on Mars, Shelton and Cross emphasized how this mission is relevant to life on Earth.

Despite similarities in their origins, Mars and Earth “took very different paths as time went on it is going to be really cool to figure out what differs between Earth and Mars and what we have in common,” Cross said.

“You know, could Mars support life? We don't know. Has it supported life? We don't know. But we're hoping to find out. It's going to answer a lot of those big questions that we have about where life came from,” she suggested.

Shelton talked about how the harsh climate conditions of Mars can help humans create technologies to navigate Earth’s increasingly extreme weather and storms. “There’s dust storms on Mars. And Mars is a very dynamic climate place … so learning how to deal with [storms] on another planet would help us,” Shelton said.

*This illustration from NASA depicts how the Perseverance rover will attempt to land on Mars on Feb. 18. Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.*

According to NASA’s website, to symbolize the likelihood that humans hope to eventually make it to Mars, nearly 11 million people have their names stenciled on silicon chips carried by the rover, which bears the message “explore as one” in Morse code.

For human life to succeed on Mars, artificial intelligence and robots would be integral to building the food systems and housing, Sheldon said. Hypothetical astronaut robots would need to have their own intelligence, she said, “because we can't drive them from here.” Those imagining a human mission to Mars envision a role for robots with AI to be an advance team that could potentially build buildings and more prior to human arrival, she explained.

This all may sound like sci-fi that will play out in some distant future time, but both Shelton and Cross said watching these interplanetary events unfold in real time is a unique experience that people across the world can share on the 18th.

“I think that people who have even a glancing interest [should] tune in because we're all feeling pretty trapped right now … just watching a robot break free could be a little bit of a relief,” Cross said.

There are 500 spots available for the Vermont Solar Systems Ambassador watch party on Zoom Feb. 18. For the meeting link, send an email with your name to caleigh.cross@gmail.com. More information is online at the official NASA TV livestream, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory YouTube channel. More information is online at the NASA mission site and the NASA Perseverance Rover site.