Nasa interview: ‘Seven minutes of terror’ as Nasa’s Mars Rover makes final approach to Mars

We come back to our coverage of Nasa’s Perseverance rover mission with Nasa’s Tyler Del Sesto. The rover, which after 300 million miles and seven months zipping through space, will reach the Red Planet today. This is the tensest bit for mission control back at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

The landing and descent is known as the “7 minutes of terror” because it takes roughly 7 minutes from the top of Mars’ atmosphere to the ground, the final hours before touchdown are the riskiest part of the mission.

It’s a case of banned Down Under as Australians woke up on Thursday with a blank Facebook news feed after the social network fell out with the government in a content payments row.

Australian authorities had drawn up the laws to “level the playing field” between the tech giants, particularly Facebook and Google’s parent company Alphabet, and struggling publishers over profits.

We spoke to Natural History Museum Professor Adrian Lister, research Leader in palaeontology, who with an international team for the first time has sequenced DNA from recovered remains about 1 million years old from an ancient, fossilised tooth of the Steppe mammoth - that has a striking resemblance to an old shoe sole.

Scientists have made new findings from DNA analysis which they say could never have been found from looking at teeth and bones - including seeing how genes evolved, the road to extinction, migration patterns and how they kept warm in freezing Siberian winters.

Plus, we cross over to Nintendo as they announce and exciting new Mario title, and a refreshed Zelda game for Switch.

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