With its impeccable landing on Thursday, NASA's Perseverance became the fifth rover to reach Mars—so when can we finally expect the long-held goal of a crewed expedition to materialize?

NASA's current Artemis program is billed as a "Moon to Mars" mission, and acting administrator Steve Jurczyk has reiterated his aspiration of "the mid-to-end of the 2030s" for American boots on the Red Planet.

But while the trip is technologically almost within grasp, experts say it's probably still decades out because of funding uncertainties.

The world got its first close-up look at a Mars landing on Friday, as NASA released a stunning picture of its newest rover being lowered onto the dusty red surface.

The photo was released less than 24 hours after the Perseverance rover successfully touched down near an ancient river delta, where it will search for signs of ancient life and set aside the most promising rock samples for return to Earth in a decade.

NASA equipped the spacecraft with a record 25 cameras and two microphones, many of which were turned on during Thursday's descent.

The rover is shown in extraordinary detail just 6 1/2 feet (2 meters) off the ground, being lowered by cables attached to an overhead sky crane, the red dust kicked up by rocket engines.

The U.S. Space Force has a serious role to play in the modern world. Its stated mission is to train and equip personnel to defend U.S. interests in space. Given the increasing military and economic importance of space, the USSF is likely to grow in importance.

But a quick internet search shows that for most people, the Space Force is more a meme than a military branch. It has been the subject of jokes on "Saturday Night Live," and Netflix was working on a comedy show before the service was officially formed.

If experiments done in small bottles in a University of Oregon lab are accurate, the friction of colliding Martian dust particles are unlikely to generate big electrical storms or threaten the newly arrived exploration vehicles or, eventually, human visitors.

For 50 years since Viking landers and later orbiters detected silts, clays, wind-blown bedforms and dust devils on Mars, scientists have worried about the potential for large lightning storms and whether static electricity generated by the planet's mostly basaltic rock particles could damage vehicles or human protective gear.

In the journal Icarus, a UO team reports that the friction caused by dust particles making contact with each other may indeed produce electrical discharges at the surface and in the planet's atmosphere, but any resulting sparks are likely to be small.

Such concerns had resurfaced in relation to the new NASA Mars mission, which successfully put the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity robotic helicopter on the red planet Feb. 18.

In the lab of volcanologist Josef Dufek, researchers used a vertical glass tube comparable in size to a water bottle measuring some 4 inches in diameter and 8 inches in length.