NASA has published a stunning 360-degree view atop Mont Mercou of the Curiosity Mars rover. The panorama is stitched together from 132 individual images taken on April 15, 2021, the 3,090th Martian day (or sol) of the mission. You can see the amazing panorama by using the arrows in the top left on the video, or by clicking (or touching) and dragging your cursor or mouse, moving the view up/down and right/left.
Great news – NASA’s Ingenuity the Mars helicopter performs its first flight. It is the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.
In April 2021, Ingenuity (the small helicopter stored in NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover) will perform the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. And NASA put a small piece of fabric on the Mars helicopter from the wing of the Wright Brothers’ first aircraft, the “Flyer 1”, which performed the first powered, controlled flight here on Earth on December 17, 1903. The swatch is bound in insulating tape to a wire under Ingenuity’s solar panel.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has published the official video of Perseverance Rover‘s first 360-degree view of Mars, and it’s amazing!
Finally, the descent and touchdown video of the Perseverance Rover fully relayed to Earth, and NASA has published it. Watch the descent and touchdown of a Mars rover, for the first time as a full video!
A car-sized rover touching down on another planet! NASA has published an amazing photo of the Perseverance Rover touchdown on Mars. For the first time in history, we have a photo of a rover’s touchdown on another planetary body.
Editor’s note: On Feb. 18, NASA’s Mars 2020 mission arrived at the red planet and successfully landed the Perseverance Rover on the surface. Jim Bell is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and has worked on a number of Mars missions. He is the primary investigator leading a team in charge of one of the camera systems on Perseverance. We spoke with him in late January for The Conversation’s new podcast, The Conversation Weekly.
NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars on 18 February 2021 at 3:55 p.m. EST (20:55 UTC). A few seconds after the successful touchdown, it sent its first photo from the Martian surface.
Space lovers around the world are holding their breath for the landing of NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars on February 18th. After a 470.73 million kilometer (292.5 million miles) journey from Earth to Mars, Perseverance will join its fellow rovers Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity on Mars, and be part of a massive scientific endeavor to find signs of ancient life on the Martian surface.
Back in 2018, using the onboard radar instrument MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding), European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter discovered an underground reservoir that is buried about 1.5 km (0.93 mi) under the ice. Now, in September 2020, scientists analyzing Mars Express data have discovered three more subglacial lakes on Mars or pools of liquid water buried under the ice in the south polar region of the red planet. Could they be an oasis for microbial life?