NASA's Perseverance and Joy Minute-by-Minute

Brandwatch Bulletin: NASA's Perseverance and Joy

A minute-by-minute look at a historic moment.

Welcome to this week’s Friday bulletin. Today we’re taking a look at the joyous moment years of NASA sweat, blood, and tears brought us yesterday: the successful landing of the Perseverance Mars rover.

If you want to get our bulletins in the future, click the button below:

Subscribe to the Brandwatch Bulletin

Welcome to the Red Planet

On 30 July 2020 NASA launched the Mars 2020 mission, sending the Perseverance rover into space aboard an Atlas V rocket. (Don’t worry, you’re still allowed to be proud of perfecting your sourdough recipe during lockdown).

While there was much fanfare at the time, attention waned in the following months as the world’s focus turned from the sky towards more pressing earthly events. From August 2020 through to January 2021, Perseverance (nicknamed Percy), was mentioned just 34k times online.

But as the big day when the rover would touchdown drew closer, people’s interest increased. In the week before touchdown day, 3.5k people were posting about the Mars 2020 mission every day, and that excitement only continued to build.

On February 18 2020, at 20:55 UTC, NASA received confirmation, after its six month voyage, that Percy had landed safely and would soon be roaming about the surface of Mars. A gigantic success, and the culmination of years of work and preparation, the landing was a truly historic moment.

Since yesterday, 1.6 million people have posted about the event online. Here’s how the conversation went, minute-by-minute, as Perseverance touched down.

At the conversation’s peak, 30k accounts posted about the mission in a single minute, with over 800k posting in total in just four hours. Meanwhile, 14 million people watched the event unfold live on NASA’s YouTube channel alone.

And, unsurprisingly, it was a happy moment.

We soon got a glimpse of Mars with Perseverance’s personal Twitter account sharing this image just after landing:

Since then articles about the successful mission have received over 6 million social shares and engagements. Perseverance’s Twitter account now boasts 1.5 million followers, too.

After the year that was 2020, people are clearly happy to see something momentous and inspiring happen as we head deeper into 2021. Let’s hope our extremely socially-distanced friend Percy makes a ton of startling discoveries to share on their Twitter account. It’ll be great content for parents who are homeschooling their kids, and we’ll certainly be following.

Thanks for reading

That’s us for today. If you’re not already subscribed, you best head here. We’ll be back on Monday.

Stay safe,

Brandwatch React Team

Update subscription preferences

Unsubscribe