Devon company that made World War Two parachutes to land Mars Perseverance Rover

A Devon company that made parachutes for the Second World War will help soften the landing of the Perseverance rover when it arrives on Mars this evening.

Tiverton-based Heathcoat Fabrics, founded by a family of inventors who began by working with lace and silk in the 19th century, now makes state-of-the-art fabric for space companies and Nasa, as well as for military and energy clients.

Director Peter Hill admitted to being "a bit nervous" for the parachute's big moment, which will take place during the "seven minutes of terror" during which the craft will be on its own after entering the Martian atmosphere, as events happen too fast to be communicated back to earth in time.

"It's been thoroughly tested. One would hope that nothing would go wrong, but landing stuff on Mars is very complicated and very difficult," he said.

The parachute, made from extremely strong nylon, has been baked at 135C to kill any microorganisms, before travelling through space at temperatures well below freezing.

The company already has significant space pedigree, having landed a probe on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005 and the Beagle 2 mission to Mars, which failed for unrelated reasons, as well as working for private space companies that Mr Hill is not allowed to name.

"No other still extant parachute fabric manufacturer is still going today, since prior to World War Two. As far as we know, there's nobody else who has been doing it as long as us. We've got a much longer history than anybody else," he says.

The company joins other British expertise in the mission, which if successfully landed will see the Rover spending a decade on Mars, collecting samples before bringing them back to Earth, in the hopes of finding proof that life once thrived there.

Sanjeev Gupta, a professor of earth science at Imperial College London, is part of the team deciding where the Rover will go once it touches down, helping Nasa with the science and engineering aspects of the mission.

The area the team is focusing on is a crater believed to have once been a river delta, chosen because it is considered the most likely to hold clues to any life in Mars's past. "Lakes are fantastic at fostering and preserving life, so if there is any to be found then it could well be in the Jezero crater," he says.

His colleague Professor Mark Sephton is an astrobiologist who specialises in searching for the "molecular fingerprints of life" in rocks and sediment.

He is part of a team of scientists from around the world who will collectively decide which 30 samples will be brought back to Earth for examination in around a decade's time.

"To be part of the team that answered the question that humanity's had almost forever - is there life outside of the Earth - would be pretty dramatic," he said. "If we choose the right rocks we've got a pretty good chance."

Experts at London's Natural History Museum, which has one of the largest collections of natural specimens in the world, will lend their expertise to managing and analysing those rocks.

As well as helping interpret data coming back from the Rover, Professor Caroline Smith, head of earth science collections at the Natural History Museum, is part of the team planning how the samples will be looked after and made available for scientific study once they return to Earth.

"We have one of the most amazing collections of natural history specimens in the world, we've got about 82 million specimens in the collection of those over 10 and a half million are rocks, minerals, dinosaurs, other fossils.

"So we're actually really quite well placed to be a part of this mission with that combined expertise of paleontology, mineralogy, and geochemistry," she said.