The other world photos of Mars’ latest robot inhabitant roll in.
NASA’s Perseverance, who touched the 28-kilometer-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero crater on Feb. 18, captured some beautiful shots of his own shadow with his cameras over the weekend to avoid danger.
Space UpClose’s Ken Kremer put two of the photos together a striking mosaic showing the outline of the rover and the rubble he had just begun to explore.
Related: NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover mission to the Red Planet pictured
Perseverance is at the heart of the $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, which will search for signs of ancient life on Jezero’s floor and collect and store dozens of monsters for future returns to Earth. The car-sized rover gets going nicely fast; instruments pay goes well, and the robot performed its first few drives on the surface of the Red Planet.
Perseverance has so far covered about 70 meters on Mars, members of the mission team Said via Twitter on Monday night (March 8). His latest ride was to explore a potential flight zone for Ingenuity, the £ 4. (1.8 kilograms) helicopter that traveled to the Red Planet with endurance.
Getting ingenuity up is the first major business trip for the Mars 2020 mission. After the small helicopter completes its flights with technological demonstrations, Perseverance will begin its science and monster collection, the team said.
The March 2020 team makes all the Perseverance photos available to the public here. As of Monday night, there were 8,802 images to view, including high-resolution 360-degree panoramas of the area near the landing site, which were recently named after the famous scientific writer Octavia Butler, and beautiful shots of the rover’s dramatic touch.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.