A visitor to an exhibition looks at a display with a replica of the Chinese Mars Rover of the Tianwen-1 spacecraft in Beijing on March 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)BEIJING – As their respective spacecrafts headed to Mars, China and the U.S. held consultations earlier this year in a somewhat unusual series of exchanges between the rivals. China's National Space Agency confirmed Wednesday that it had working-level meetings and communications with NASA from January to March “to ensure the flight safety" of their crafts. U.S. law bans almost all contacts between NASA and China over concerns about technology theft and the secretive, military-backed nature of China’s space program. China's Tianwen-1 is orbiting Mars in preparation for a landing in May or June.

[MORE: NASA is about to land the first tiny helicopter on Mars]With so much money flowing into the new Perseverance rover you can’t help but wonder, could the mission fail? The rover’s landing has been dubbed “seven minutes of terror.”“Entry, Descent landing is the most critical and most dangerous part of the mission success is never assured. And that’s especially true when we’re trying to land the biggest heaviest and most complicated rover we’ve ever built,” Mars 2020 entry, descent and landing lead Allen Chen said. During the descent, NASA teams will be in the dark, hence the scariest seven minutes of the mission. “We certainly don’t want to land on that,” Erisa Stilley, Perseverance entry, descent and landing engineer said when referring to the cliff.