The image of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures Perseverance as it parachutes through the atmosphere
Washington:
NASA released new stunning photos from Perseverance on Friday, including one of the rover being lightly lowered to the surface of Mars by a set of cables, the first time such a view has been captured.
The high-resolution resolution was taken from a video made by the spacecraft’s descent stage carrying the rover from Earth.
At that time, the descent stage was using its six-engine jetpack to slow down to about 2.7 kilometers per hour as part of the “skycran maneuver”, the final phase of landing.
The moment my team dreamed of for years is now a reality. Dare strong things. #CountdownToMarspic.twitter.com/8SgV53S9KG
– Perseverance NASA Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 19, 2021
“You can see the dust hit by the rover’s engines,” said Adam Steltzner, Perseverance’s chief engineer, who estimated the shot was fired about two meters (six feet) above the ground.
The three straight lines are mechanical brakes that keep the rover under the descent stage, while the curly cable was used to transmit data from the cameras to Perseverance.
When the rover went down, it cut 6.4-meter cables, allowing the descent stage to fly to land safely.
Another new image, made by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, captures Perseverance as it parachutes through the atmosphere at hundreds of kilometers per hour.
Perseverance also managed to upload its first high-resolution color photograph, which shows the flat region 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 over 3.6 billion years old, located next to it.
“One of the questions we will ask first is whether these rocks are of volcanic or sedimentary origin,” said Katie Stack Morgan, NASA’s assistant researcher.
In particular, volcanic rocks can be dated with great precision once the evidence is brought back to Earth on a future return mission.
In particular, volcanic rocks can be dated with great precision once the evidence is brought back to Earth on a future return mission – an interesting development from the perspective of planetary science.
As the first images appeared, “it was exciting, the team went crazy,” said Pauline Hwang, the mission’s operations system manager.
“The scientific team immediately started looking at all those stones and magnifying and saying, ‘What’s this! ”- could not have been better. “
The first two images were released on Thursday shortly after the rover landed, but had a lower resolution in black and white due to the limited rate of data available.
NASA hopes to have more high-resolution photos and videos in the coming days, but it still doesn’t know if it successfully recorded sound on Mars for the first time using microphones.
This could be known later this weekend or early next week, Steltzner said.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is published in a syndicated stream.)