A high-resolution camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the Perseverance Rover after landing on the Red Planet last month, dropping the nuclear-powered robot on the surface of Mars with its supersonic parachute and other components of the landing system scattered nearby.
MRO’s high-resolution imaging science experiment, or HiRISE,’s camera footage looks at the Perseverance Rover at Jezero Crater on multiple passes across the landing site after the craft’s arrival at the Red Planet on 18 February. and its surroundings in false color, with scars on the Martian surface carved out by Perseverance’s right cabinets just before touch.
The HiRISE instrument is the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet. The camera was developed at the University of Arizona and has a telescope. It is used to map the surface of Mars, study the geology of the planet and explore landing sites for future missions.
According to NASA’s Jet Jet Propulsion Laboratory, MRO captured the February 24 image of perseverance at a distance of about 180 kilometers (290 kilometers). The rover is about 3 to 2.7 meters in size.
The Mars orbit also saw a glimpse of the parachute a few miles northwest of Perseverance’s landing site. The parachute deployed after the rover entered the atmosphere and slowed the spacecraft to a subsonic speed. This was followed by the heat shield of the spacecraft, which dropped to the Martian surface. Its wreckage lies east of the landing gear of the Rover.
About a minute before the touch, the parachute and the upper part of the plane of the rover called the back shell separated, and a rocket-propelled jet suit led Perseverance the rest of the way to the surface. Eight rocket motors with variable thrust pull out the rest of the rover’s vertical velocity, and the robot sinks under the downhill path on three nylon inches.
Perseverance hit on its six wheels, and the downhill road cut its connection to the rover and flew in a diverted maneuver to the northwest to escape to a safe distance from the rover. The impact site of the downhill stage is also visible in MRO’s HiRISE images.
Perseverance is on a $ 2.7 billion mission to study whether the Jezero Crater site, which once housed more liquid water, was ever habitable for ancient Martian life forms. The rover deposited near sediments through a dried-up river that fed into the lake at Jezero, and scientists plan to drive perseverance to the delta deposits to collect rock samples for eventual return to Earth.
The 1 ton Mars rover also carries instruments to detect Martian weather, measure the composition of rocks, and has the first microphone and a zoom camera flying to the Red Planet.
Perseverance also has a tool to demonstrate the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere, an ability that can help future human astronauts.
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