July 20, 1976: Landing on the red planet

NASA’s Perseverance rover, contained inside its aeroshell for a searing plunge into the Martian atmosphere next year, has been cocooned inside the payload shroud of its Atlas 5 launcher and mated with the rocket ahead of liftoff from Cape Canaveral scheduled for July 30.

NASA’s first space station — the Skylab orbital workshop — was launched atop a Saturn 5 rocket today, May 14, in 1973.

Twenty-eight thousand students across the United States submitted essays and proposed names for NASA’s newest Mars rover and on Thursday, the agency announced the winner: Perseverance, submitted by Virginia seventh-grader Alexander Mather.