After a long weekend with no updates or images from the Perseverance Mars rover, NASA released a spectacular abundance of video on Monday, including never-before-seen footage from the hair-raising descent to the surface of the red planet.
While earlier landers captured still images during the descent that were later stitched together to form a sort of stop action film, Perseverance was equipped with ‘rugged’ standard video cameras to capture high-resolution footage of the rover’s dive to land on. the floor of Crater lake
Over the weekend, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where Perseverance was built, downloaded 30 gigabytes of data from the rover, 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 that we have actually captured an event such as the landing of a spacecraft on Mars,” said JPL director Michael Watkins. “We’ll learn something by looking at the performance of the vehicle in these videos. But a lot of it is also meant to take you on our journey, our landing to Mars and of course our surface mission. Great videos.”
NASA / JPL-Caltech
A camera mounted on the back of Perseverance’s flying saucer-like aeroshell captured crystal-clear images of the spacecraft’s 70.5-foot-wide parachute unfolding in the supersonic slipstream and inflating in half a second to act as a 60,000-pound brake slowing the craft from just under 1,000 mph to a quieter 200 mph.
Equally spectacular views showed the approaching ground below as the 1-tonne rover swung gently under the parachute. The rover then fell free and its rocket-powered backpack shot upward, guiding the craft safely to a previously selected landing site.
As the backpack lowered Perseverance to the surface, the exhaust plumes from the descent’s eight engines raised swirling clouds of dust that momentarily obscured the lander. Then, with the wheels on the ground, the support cables were cut and a camera on Persistence showed the backpack pulling away and flying out of sight.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Along with the unprecedented video, NASA has also released more photos of the surface showing the rover’s landing site in Jezero Crater, which once contained a 28-mile-wide lake fed by a river that deposited sediments in a wide delta. The cliffs that mark the edge of that delta, about 2 kilometers further to the northwest, can be clearly seen through Perseverance’s cameras.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Deputy project manager Matt Wallace said the idea of placing video cameras onboard to document the rover’s entry, descent, and landing came after he purchased a small sports camera for his daughter that she wore in a harness while practicing gymnastics.
“She did a back flip and I don’t know about you, but I can’t do a back flip,” he said. “But when she showed me the video … I saw what it would be like if I could do a back flip. And that was when I had to call my friend (persistence camera engineer) Dave Grohl, and that led to to this system. “
In addition to 25 cameras, the rover also has two microphones. One didn’t work during the descent, but the other picked up the sounds of the Martian wind blowing past. NASA released a piece of audio that was picked up by the rover’s microphone – the first sound ever recorded on another planet.
Launched in July last year, Perseverance reached Mars on Thursday, February 18 and plunged into the atmosphere for a seven-minute descent.
The river and lake that fed it some 3.5 billion years ago are long gone, but scientists say remnants of past microbial life, if it existed, could be preserved in deposits of the soil. Perseverance is the first lander sent specifically to Mars to search for such “biosignatures” and to cache soil and rock samples for eventual return to Earth.
The descent of persistence, like that of the Curiosity rover before it, is known as “seven minutes of terror” due to the extreme entry environment and the myriad of events that must occur in time and without Earth intervention to complete a successful landing.
NASA / JPL / Caltech
Despite promises before landing that “raw” footage from the rover’s hazard avoidance cameras and others would be posted as soon as they came in, less than half a dozen had been released Friday night, and none had surfaced over the weekend.
That raised concern among space enthusiasts, but Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s scientific director, tweeted Sunday that the focus was on downloading onboard video and data about the health of the rover’s systems.
“Since the landing of @NASAPersevere, we have prioritized two types of data: first-of-its-kind images of the rover’s arrival, descent and landing. And health and safety data for the rover and its subsystems,” he tweeted. .
He later added, “I am so proud of this @NASAPersevere team because they have worked so hard and diligently and are able to deliver things to us ahead of schedule because they know the intense public interest.”