NASA on Monday released the first high-quality video of a spacecraft landing on Mars, a three-minute trailer showing the giant orange and white parachute hurting open and the red dust kicking in while engines rocket lowers the rover to the surface.
The U.S. space agency also released an audio clip from the Red Planet. You will hear a faint sound of wind recorded by the researcher.
The footage was so good – and the imagery so stunning – that members of the rover team said they felt like they were riding a bike.
“It gives me goose bumps every time I see it, just amazing,” said Dave Gruel, head of the entry and rescue camera team.
The Perseverance rover landed last Thursday near an old river delta in Jezero Crater to find signs of the life of an ancient microscope. After spending the weekend watching the descent and landing a video, the team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shared the video at a press conference.
“These videos and images are the stuff of our dreams,” said Al Chen, who was in charge of the landing team.
Six off-the-shelf color cameras were worn on entry, descent and landing, looking up and down from different perspectives. All but one camera worked. The single-turned microphone failed to land, but NASA received a few snippets of noise after the crash: whirring the rover’s systems and gusts of wind.
Flight controllers were thrilled with the thousands of photos taken back – and also with the remarkably good condition of NASA’s largest and most capable rover yet. He will spend the next two years exploring a dry river delta and drilling into rocks that could hold evidence of a life of 3 billion to 4 billion years ago. The main symbols will be set aside for a return to Earth in ten years.
NASA contributed 25 cameras to the $ 3 billion mission (approximately Rs. 21,710 crores) – the largest ever sent to Mars. The rover of the previous space agency, 2012’s Curiosity, controlled only moving, motionless, mostly terrestrial images. Curiosity still works. So is NASA ‘s InSight controller, albeit obstructed by dusty solar panels.
They may have a company in late spring, when China attempts to land its own rover, which went into orbit around Mars two weeks ago.
The project’s deputy manager, Matt Wallace, said he was inspired several years ago to film the Perseverance harrowing offspring when his young gymnast daughter was photographing while doing a backdrop.
Some spacecraft systems – such as the spacecraft used to bring the rover down to the Martian surface – could not be tested on Earth.
“So this is the first time we as engineers have had the opportunity to see what we designed,” Wallace told reporters.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s head of science mission, said the video and also the panoramic views after a touchdown were “the closest you can get ashore on Mars without putting on a pressure suit.”
The images will help NASA prepare for astronauts’ flights to Mars in the coming decades, according to the engineers.
There is a faster gain.
“I know it was a tough year for everyone,” said image scientist Justin Maki, “and we hope these images may help brighten up people’s days. ”
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