Image by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, captures perseverance as it parachutes through the atmosphere
Washington:
NASA on Friday unveiled beautiful new photos of Perseverance, including one of the rover gently lowered by the set of cables to the surface of Mars, the first time such a view has been captured.
The high resolution was still extracted from a video taken by the spaceship transporting the rover off Earth.
At that moment, the turn-off stage used its six-engine aircraft package to decelerate to a speed of about 2.7 kilometers per hour as part of the ‘skycrane maneuver’, the final phase of landing.
The moment my team has been dreaming about for years is now a reality. Dare to do mighty things. # CountdownToMarspic.twitter.com/8SgV53S9KG
– NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) 19 February 2021
“You can see the dust being kicked up by the engines of the car,” said Adam Steltzner, chief engineer at Perseverance. It is estimated that the shot was taken about two meters above the ground.
The three straight lines are mechanical reins that hold the crossbar below the descent point, while the curled cable was used to transfer the data from the cameras to Perseverance.
When the rover touches, it cuts 6.4-meter-long cables, causing the descent stage to fly for its own safe landing.
Another new image, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, captures perseverance as it parachutes through the atmosphere hundreds of miles per hour.
Perseverance was also able to upload its first high-resolution color photo that uploaded the flat region it ended up in the Jezero Crater, where a river and deep existed billions of years ago.
A second color image shows one of the Rover’s six wheels, with several honeycombs that are more than 3.6 billion years old.
“One of the questions we will first ask is whether these rocks are of volcanic or sedimentary origin,” said Katie Stack Morgan, NASA’s deputy project scientist.
Especially volcanic rocks can be dated with a very high precision as soon as the samples are brought to earth on a future return mission
Volcanic rocks in particular can be dated with a very high precision once the samples are brought back to Earth on a future return mission – an exciting development from a planetary scientific perspective.
When the first images came in, ‘it was exciting, the team went wild,’ said Pauline Hwang, manager of the mission operating system.
“The science team immediately started looking at all the rocks and zooming in and out: ‘What is this!’ – it could not have been better. ‘
The first two images were released Thursday shortly after the rover landed, but they have a lower resolution and in black and white due to the limited available data rate.
NASA hopes to have more high-resolution photos and videos in the coming days, but does not yet know if it first recorded audio using Mars using microphones.
It may be known later this weekend or early next week, Steltzner said.
(Except for the headline, this story was not processed by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)