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.
Why there are no stars in space photos? Or in moon landing photos? Because, when you try to shoot a very bright object (for example, the Earth) and very dim objects (stars) in the same frame, you cannot properly expose both. To be able to see the stars, the bright object would have to be overexposed making it appear as a featureless white blob.
On January 19, 2006, aboard an Atlas V rocket, NASA’s New Horizons probe started its fantastic voyage of exploration with a spectacular launch from the Florida coast toward Pluto and the mysterious realm of the Kuiper Belt beyond.
On January 12, 2021, the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite (see notes 1) captured this amazing photo of Spain under a snow blanket.