The image of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, captures perseverance as it went skydiving through the atmosphere
Washington:
NASA on Friday released stunning new photographs of Perseverance, including one of the rovers that was gently lowered to the surface of Mars by a set of cables, the first time that sight was captured.
The high resolution was still extracted from a video taken by the descent stage of the spacecraft that had transported the rover from Earth.
At the time, the descent stage was using its six-engine jetpack to reduce speed to about 2.7 miles per hour as part of the “skycrane maneuver,” the final phase of landing.
The moment my team dreamed of for years is now a reality. Dare with powerful things. #CountdownToMarspic.twitter.com/8SgV53S9KG
– NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 19, 2021
“You can see the dust pulled by the rover’s engines,” said Adam Steltzner, chief engineer at Perseverance, who estimated the shot was made about two meters (six feet) from the ground.
The three straight lines are mechanical flanges that hold the rover below the descent stage, while the curly wire was used to transmit camera data to Perseverance.
When the rover hit the ground, it cut 6.4-meter-long cables, allowing the descent stage to move away for its own safe landing.
Another new image, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, captures perseverance as it parachutes through the atmosphere at hundreds of miles per hour.
Perseverance has also been able to hang its first high-resolution color photo showing the flat region where it landed in Jezero crater, where there was a river and a deep lake billions of years ago.
A second color image shows one of the rover’s six wheels, with several honeycomb rocks believed to be more than 3.6 billion years old.
“One of the questions we’ll ask first is whether these rocks represent a volcanic or sedimentary origin,” said Katie Stack Morgan, an assistant scientist on the NASA project.
Volcanic rocks, in particular, can be dated with very high accuracy once samples are returned to Earth on a future return mission.
Volcanic rocks, in particular, can be dated with very high accuracy once the samples return to Earth on a future return mission, an exciting development from the perspective of planetary science.
When the first images appeared, “it was stimulating, the team went wild,” said Pauline Hwang, the mission’s operations system manager.
“The science team immediately started looking at all these rocks, expanding and saying,‘ What is this? “- It couldn’t have been better.”
The first two images were released Thursday shortly after the rover landed, but had lower resolution and black and white due to the limited data rate available.
NASA hopes to have more high-resolution photos and videos in the next few days, but it still doesn’t know if it has successfully recorded the sound on Mars for the first time using microphones.
That could be known later this weekend or early next week, Steltzner said.
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