NASA Perseverance Rover: Watch the first video coming from Mars

This story is part of Welcome to Mars, our series exploring the red planet.

NASA has unveiled incredible ‘first of its kind’ footage from the entry, descent and landing of its latest, most ambitious, next-generation rover, Perseverance. The agency teased that we would be able to see ‘Mars like never before’, and that was not a joke. The six-wheeled robber landed safe and sound on the surface of Mars on February 18 and a series of specialized cameras captured every moment from the moment his parachute was deployed to the touch.

“This is the first time we have been able to capture an event such as the landing of a spacecraft on Mars,” Mike Watkins, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a news conference on Monday. “We watched them all this weekend.”

You can watch the landing video below:

Play now:
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Look at the descent of endurance to the Martian surface

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The footage starts about seven kilometers above the surface and ends with a farewell to the downhill stage of Perseverance. An extreme amount of data has been sent back to earth to give us images of another world. “We collected a little over 30 GB of information and more than 23,000 images of the vehicle descending to the surface of Mars,” said Dave Gruel, EDL and Camera Suite.

We have become a little familiar with the dusty red surface of our cosmic neighbor, mostly thanks to rover missions led by NASA over the past two decades. But even the sharpest Mars viewers will be blown away by what NASA has delivered from just above the surface of an alien planet.

There are many wonderful moments in the footage. The heat shield flown down from the bottom of the spacecraft is a tranquil sayonara for Perseverance’s protective gear. The black disk flies from Perseverance to its final resting place on the surface of Mars.

But the highlight of the new footage is the vision of both the rover looking up to its downhill stage and the opposite, looking down from the descending stage.

We have already seen beautiful images from the descent and landing phase, but to see it unfold in real time is surprising.

The downhill road lowers endurance on the ground via a ‘skycrane’ – like a rear claw machine, which drops a toy, rather than picking it up. Once the rover is safely on the ground, the downhill shift flies autonomously from the landing zone of the Rover and its noses into the Martian soil. “Percy” gets a wonderful look at the descent stage just before it leaves, a final farewell to the craft before it dies.

The team also unveiled sound from a microphone installed on Perseverance, although sound could not be restored during the landing phase. “What we think happened is that there was a communication error between the device that is responsible for digitizing the analog signals that record the microphone and then pass the app to the computer that stores all the data,” Gruel said.

Perseverance is now ready to locate its new home in the Jezero crater, an old lake bed, for signs of past lives. We have already seen the fruits of his early labor in beautiful images of his descent and landing, and the press briefing showed many more images. The team has promised that thousands of raw images will be available on the perseverance mission site today.

Perseverance launched on July 30, 2020 under the early morning sun off the Florida coast aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V. It has spent the past seven months from Earth to Mars, protected from the harsh environment in Mars 2020 -spaceship.

When it reached Mars, it examined its outer layer and struck the red planet’s soft atmosphere. Only ten minutes later, it planted its six wheels firmly on the Martian soil in the Jezero crater, a place that scientists once thought was a lake bed. Where there is water, there is life potential and perseverance will seek signs Mars was once inhabited by foreign microbes.

You can watch the full personal information session at the link below:

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