It barely got to know its new home on the Mars surface. Yet perseverance is already sending criminals home.
Some of the first information leaked from NASA’s new rover by spacecraft orbiting Mars and brought back to Earth was data indicating that the rover was healthy after its ‘seven minutes of scare’ from the top of the planet’s atmosphere to the surface. It also sent back some images. On Friday night, NASA shared one showing how the rover lands. The image comes from a video of the landing that has not yet been shared with the world.
The snapshot was taken from the spacecraft’s descent stage, which was part of the Rover’s final landing maneuver. This lowered the perseverance to the Martian surface on ters. Curiosity, the last rover to land on Mars, has returned a stop-motion movie of its descent. On the other hand, perseverance has cameras that were meant to record videos of the touch. We’ll be looking into that soon.
In the coming weeks and months (and years!) We will become more familiar with Perseverance and all we can tell about Mars. However, we can now get excited about the imaging capabilities. “The majority of Perseverance’s cameras capture color images,” says NASA. “After landing, two of the Hazard Cameras (Hazcams) saw the front and back of the rover and showed one of its wheels in the Mars dirt.” You can also see an image from the corner here.