After a long weekend with no updates or pictures of Mars rover perseverance, NASA on Monday launched a spectacular video reward, including unreleased images that captured the hair loss on the surface of the red planet.
While earlier landers captured still images during the descent that later came together to form a sort of stop movie, Perseverance was equipped with “tough” video cameras to shoot high-resolution images of the rover’s fall. until landing on the floor of Crater Lake.
Over the weekend, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where Perseverance was built, linked 30 gigabytes of rover data, including 23,000 images and video frames. This allowed them to give the public a bird’s eye view of a landing on Mars.
“This is the first time we can really capture an event like the landing of a spacecraft on Mars,” said JPL director Michael Watkins. “We’ll learn something by watching the vehicle’s performance in these videos. But a lot of things are also to take you on our journey, our touch on Mars, and of course our superficial mission. They’re also really amazing videos.”
NASA / JPL-Caltech
A camera mounted on the back of Perseverance’s flying beach captured crystal clear views of the spacecraft’s parachute unfolding in supersonic current, inflating in half a second to act as a 60,000-pound brake, braking the boat from just under 1,000 mph to about 200 mph calmer.
Equally spectacular views looking down showed the terrain approaching below as the 1-ton rover swayed gently under the parachute. The rover fell free and the backpack with rocket fired, guiding the boat to a risk-free landing site it selected earlier.
When the backpack dropped Perseverance to the surface, the exhaust feathers from the eight engines of the downhill vehicle fired swirling clouds of dust that briefly obscured the landing. Then, with their wheels on the ground, the support wires were cut and a camera at Perseverance showed the backpack moving away and flying out of sight.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Along with the unprecedented video, NASA also posted more photos from the surface showing the rover’s landing site in Jezero Crater, which once had a 28-mile-wide lake fed by a river that deposited sediment. in a wide delta. Perseverance cameras can clearly see the cliffs that mark the edge of this delta about 1.2 miles to the northwest.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Project deputy director Matt Wallace said the idea of putting video cameras on board to document the rover’s entry, descent and landing came after he bought his daughter a small sports camera that he wore a harness while practicing gymnastics.
“He did a back throw and I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t do a back throw,” he said. “But when he showed me the video … I took a look at what it would be like if I could take a shot in the back. And that was the moment that inspired a phone call to my friend (Perseverance camera engineer) Dave Grohl , and that is what led to this system “.
Along with 25 cameras, the rover also carries two microphones. One did not work during the descent, but the other caught the sounds of the passing Martian wind. NASA released a fragment of audio captured by the rover’s microphone, the first sound ever recorded on another planet.
Launched last July, Perseverance reached Mars on Thursday, February 18 and plunged into the atmosphere for a seven-minute descent.
The river and lake it fed about 3.5 billion years ago have disappeared, but scientists say the remnants of past microbial life, if they existed, could be preserved in deposits from the lake’s beds. Perseverance is the first lander sent to Mars specifically to search for these “biosignatures” and to store soil and rock samples to eventually return to Earth.
The offspring of perseverance, like that of the Curiosity rover before, is known as “seven minutes of terror” because of the extreme entrance environment and the countless events that must happen in time and without the intervention of the Earth. to complete a successful landing.
NASA / JPL / Caltech
Despite promises before landing that “raw” images from the rover’s and others’ risk-avoidance cameras would be posted as they entered, less than half a dozen had been posted on Friday evening and none appeared during the weekend.
This sparked concern among space enthusiasts, but Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s scientific director, tweeted Sunday that he focused on downloading video and data on board about the health of the rover’s systems.
“Since the @NASAPersevere landing, we have prioritized two types of data: the first material of its kind from the entrance, descent and landing of the rover. And the health and safety data of the rover and its subsystems he tweeted. .
He later added: “I am very proud of this @NASAPersevere team for working so hard and diligently and for being able to deliver things to us ahead of schedule because they know the intense public interest.”