Nasa releases video landing on Mars: ‘Stuff of our dream’

CAPE CANAVERAL: Nasa Monday released the first high-quality video of a spacecraft landing on Mars, a three-minute trailer showing the giant orange and white parachute squirming open and the red dust kicking like rocket engines lower the rover to the surface.
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 goosebumps 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 transfer 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 got a few bits 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 amazingly 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 added 25 cameras to the $ 3 billion mission 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 Nasa has the InSight controller, albeit blocked 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.
Deputy project manager Matt Wallace He said he was inspired several years ago to film the Perseverance harrowing offspring when his young gymnast daughter was on camera while he was making 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, head of Nasa’s science mission, said the video and also the panoramic scenes after a touchdown were “the closest they got to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit.”
The images will help prepare Nasa for astronauts’ flights to Mars in the coming decades, according to the engineers.
There is a faster gain.
“I know it’s been a tough year for everyone,” said image scientist Justin Maki, “and we hope those images may help brighten people’s days.”