We're just a short time away from seeing NASA's Perseverance rover make a daring landing inside of the 28 mile-wide Jezero Crater. This is officially called the entry, descent and landing (EDL) phase of a Mars mission, but unofficially, it's called "seven minutes of terror". Why, do you ask? That's because the sequence happens faster than radio signals can reach Earth from Mars. Essentially the spacecraft is on its own once it makes it to the Martian atmosphere, zooming in at around 12,000 mph. Everything has to be executed perfectly for this to work. Check out this video from NASA, showing just how this will take place.
I honestly can't even imagine how the scientists and engineers working on this project are feeling during those seven minutes. As you said, everything has to be done perfectly and they won't know if they did everything right for nearly ten minutes!
I hope everything goes to plan and we soon see some awesome images from the surface of Mars.
The descent stage and the 'sky crane maneuver' are awesome. All of this is genius and I really hope there are no issues because this is far and away the most interesting rover mission yet.
Success!!!