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.
The mission team also saw the rover’s health report, and which showed everything appeared to be working as expected. The photos, health reports, and all the data are relaying to Earth by several spacecraft orbiting Mars, including NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which orbiting the red planet since March 10, 2006.
The Martian rover also captured its descent with the cameras onboard – the still image above was taken from that footage. The footage is still being relayed to Earth and will be published after getting processed.
Update: NASA has published the descent and touchdown video of the Perseverance Mars rover.
Perseverance Rover’s First Full-Color Look at Mars
NASA has also published the Mars rover’s first full-color photo from the Martian surface.
A primary objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology research, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith, paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
Sources
- NASA’s Perseverance Rover Sends Sneak Peek of Mars Landing on the NASA website
- For more about Perseverance: Mission home page on the NASA website
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