MUMBAI: After seven months in space, in a nail-biting landing, NASA's largest and most advanced Mars rover, Perseverance today successfully touched down in a vast crater on the Martian surface marking NASA's first step in the search for signs of microbial life on the Red Planet.

The landing was confirmed by Indian-American flight controller Swati Mohan who announced, "Touchdown confirmed! Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking signs of past life," and the entire team at NASA and everyone else who were awaiting the confirmation broke into celebrations.

With a short while of landing the rover sent a black and white photo of the planet's surface which was tweeted by the account created by NASA for its Perseverance Mars Rover with the tweet, "Hello, world. My first look at my forever home."

Perseverance is one of the most advanced astrobiology lab packed with groundbreaking technology ever sent to another plant and was launched on July 30, last year, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, US under NASA's Mars 2020 mission. It has travelled for 203 days and traversed 472 million kilometres, to reach Mars.

Director of NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory, Michael Watkins said that landing on Mars is always an incredibly difficult task.

"We built the rover not just to land but to find and collect the best scientific samples for return to Earth, and it’s incredibly complex sampling system and autonomy not only enable that mission, they set the stage for future robotic and crewed missions," Watkins said.

The Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing Instrumentation 2 sensor suite collected data about Mars' atmosphere during entry, and the Terrain-Relative Navigation system autonomously guided the spacecraft during final descent.