Watch NASA’s Perseverance Rover Land on Mars! This Thursday 18 Feb :-)

Watch out for the Stromatolites... around the crater rim. They are wondering if their might be some there in Jezero crater. We have them on Earth and are one of the oldest forms of life on Earth.

Living stromatolites were first discovered in 1956, in the salty water of Hamelin Pool at Shark Bay, Western Australia. Stromatolites have been dated back to as far as 3.4 billion years ago, and are amongst the oldest known fossils found on earth.

Eyes on Perseverance:

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/mars2020/#/home

My son had enough for now and went to watch Mr. Bean on the TV.
Hope he is back with me for the landing.

We are all watching here. Well. I am. The wife is losing interest and the baby didn't have much interest to start with.

I find the bottom video in the first post to be much better.

Are they what are known as living rocks?

Thanks for the tip. We have Switched to that one.

Touchdown.
I felt very emotional.

Very anazing to see that first image from the engineering camera. I admire the skill of this team of people managing to do this, first time, with only limited testing. Amazing job and the reason why I believe that NASA is still the finest space organisation on the planet. Well done guys.

Dust on the lens and in B&W but still amazing.

Perseverance Rover is great news for a world turned upside down by a pandemic

Living fossils.

Anyone know where exactly within the crater they touched down exactly? Maybe they don’t know yet?

I think they might be what badjao call living rocks, one of lolas brothers has them in his saltwater aquarium.

Ah. I thought you might have seen them in Australia.

I wouldn't know one coral from another or a lump of coal from a diamond, but I have spent time on badjao seaweed farms and seen some of the corals and stuff they collect, they sell what they call living rocks, I think it's the same thing.

Stromatolites are a bit more primitive than corals. And go back a lot further in time.

https://t.co/KETtUwGpmO

“In Western Australia, 3.5bn-year-old stromatolites built up the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere to about 20%, giving the kiss of life to all that was to evolve.”

Why do they keep them in the tank? To oxygenate the water?

I don't know to be honest, I wasn't really interested in his tank, his house is 10 meters from the sea, they have I think 650 yard stretch of private fenced beach, I actually said he should have left the fish etc in the sea and just snorkelled every day to see them instead of bringing them in the house.