So over the past few days, two new Mars missions have successfully entered orbit around the Red Planet - China’s ambitious Tianwen 1 mission which will see and orbiter and a lander with rover explore Mars in China’s first interplanetary Space mission.

The previous day, the Hope mission from the UAE also successfully broke into Mars orbit after a 400 million kilometre journey from Earth.

But the most ambitious mission of all is the NASA Mars Perseverance Rover, a huge 1,500 kg rover and automate mobile science laboratory which will land at the Jezero Crater, at the site of an ancient river delta to look for signs of past life on Mars.

In little over and hour, the rover will - hopefully - make a successful landing with pinpoint accuracy via the 21st Century skycrane system. The video below shows the landing sequence. Fingers crossed! You can watch the landing live at Mission Control on BBC news at 8pm.

Amazing !Lets hope its successful tonight, America needs something to be proud of

Watching it on NASA TV, didn't realise it was on BBC.

Successful landing for Perseverance!!!

Hello Earth, Mars calling...

Surely by now, they can put humanoids on it and see if they can make the planet habitable?

Are you putting yourself forward as a candidate.?

I'd love too, but I am busy and not fit to cut the grass on mars.

Not sure that they are in urgent need of Lawn Mowers.

Terraforming is the stuff of Sci-fi unfortunately. With no magnetic field any atmosphere would just get stripped away by the solar wind. Until we figure out how to build planet sized magnetic fields it's a non-starter.

Isn't our magnetic field, in the core and when that goes cold? The field will die and exposing us to same conditions as Mars.

Pretty much, but as far as I know most scientists think the Earth is sufficiently large that the motion of the core will never allow it to cool. Mars at about half the size of Earth didn't have that chance. Shame really, having a living neighbouring planet would have been cool (in theory anyway, we'd more than likely have started a war with them by now)

Edit: I was slighlty wrong. Upon further googling it's actually radioactivity that will keep the core molten a few billion years more and not the size or rotation of the planet.

Does NASA, ever look at their own planet and try fix the issues here?

What issues do you think a space administration would be qualified to address?

Changes in weather, human behavior and industrial damage to planet. If they are looking at other planets, far away and trying to determine its history? They could, have a look in their own backyard and advise on behaviours?