Join us for a live Q&A with members of the team that helped get NASA's Perseverance rover to Mars! Tag your questions with #CountdownToMars​ and we'll answer as many as we can during our 3:00pm ET live event today. A new chapter of Mars exploration has officially begun! On Feb. 18, 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars. What’s next? The rover will prepare to explore its new Martian home, search for signs of ancient life and collect samples to be returned by a future mission. On this episode of NASA Science Live we feature: - Dr. Moogega Cooper, host of the episode and lead of making sure the rover didn’t bring Earth bacteria with it to Mars - Dr. Kelsey Moore, Perseverance Science Team Member studying astrobiology and how early life forms - Gregorio Villar, Entry Descent and Landing Operations Lead who helped build and test the system that landed the Perseverance rover on Mars

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris placed a special phone call to space this week when she spoke with astronaut Victor Glover who is aboard the International Space Station. Glover, a crew member of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission, is the first African American astronaut to fly on a commercial spacecraft, and the first African American to fly a long-term mission aboard the orbiting laboratory. This is his first spaceflight since being selected as a NASA astronaut in 2013.

In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory and downlinked the video on Nov. 18, just hours before she, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency departed in their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan. The tour includes scenes of each of the station's modules and research facilities with a running narrative by Williams of the work that has taken place and which is ongoing aboard the orbital outpost.

Presidential congratulations for the Mars Perseverance rover team, the rover makes its first drive on the Red Planet, and a pair of spacewalks outside the space station … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!