Image by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, capturing Sustainability as it marches down through the atmosphere
Washington:
NASA on Friday released stunning new images from Perseverance, including one of the rover gently lowered to the surface of Mars with a set of cables, the first time such a sight has been captured.
The high resolution was still taken from video taken at the descent stage of the spacecraft that had carried the rover from Earth.
At that time, the descent was using its six-engine jetpack to tow at a speed of about 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) per hour as part of the “moving skycrane man,” the final stage of landing.
The time my team had been dreaming for years, is now a reality. Dare powerful things. #CountdownToMarspic.twitter.com/8SgV53S9KG
– Marsever Perseverance NASA (@NASAPersevere) February 19, 2021
“You can see the dust kicked by the rover’s engines,” said Adam Steltzner, Perseverance’s chief engineer, who estimated the photograph was taken about two meters (six feet) or so above the ground.
The three straight lines are mechanical bridges that keep the rover below the level of the descent, while the twisted cable was used to carry the data from the cameras to Stability.
When the rover crashed, it cut cables 6.4 meters long, allowing the rescue platform to fly away for its own safe landing.
Another new image, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, captures Sustainability as it marches down through the atmosphere at hundreds of miles per hour.
Perseverance has also been able to upload the first tall color photo showing the flat area it landed in Crazer Jezero, where there was a deep river and lake billions of years ago.
A second color image shows one of the rover’s six wheels, with several honeycombs estimated to be over 3.6 billion years old lying next to it.
“One of the questions we first ask is whether these rocks represent a volcanic or sedimentary origin,” said NASA project assistant scientist Katie Stack Morgan.
Volcanic rocks in particular can be separated with very high precision once the samples are returned to Earth on a future return trip.
Volcanic rocks in particular can be extracted with very high precision once the samples are returned to Earth on a return trip in the future – an interesting development from a planetary science perspective.
As the first images came in, “it was interesting, the team went wild,” said mission operations system manager Pauline Hwang.
“The science team immediately started looking at those rocks and moving in and going, ‘What’s that!’ – it couldn’t be better.”
The first two images were released Thursday shortly after the rover landed, but were lower in resolution and in black-and-white due to the limited data available.
NASA hopes to get more high-resolution photos and videos in the coming days, but it is not yet known if it has recorded sound on Mars for the first time using microphones.
That could be known later in the weekend or early next week, Steltzner said.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is published from syndicated food.)