The Perseverance rover from NASA has landed and has proven a touchdown on Mars. Perseverance is secured on the surface of Mars, and is ready to start looking for past life signs, NASA engineer Swati Mohan said during a landing livestream on February 18th. February is the month of arrivals on Mars from space agencies around the globe, the rover caps off. Perseverance too joins hope, the first interplanetary spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates, which successfully reached Mars orbit on February 9th and Tianwen-1, China’s first Mars mission, which arrived on February 10th, and will be deployed on the Martian surface in May.
NASA broadcasted the landing of Perseverance on YouTube beginning at 2:15 pm on 18 February, and it reached Mars at about 3:55 pm. Perseverance is planned to explore an ancient river delta called the Jezero crater, to search for signs of ancient life, and to gather rocks for a possible quest to return to Earth. The rover used the landing system, which has been exploring Mars since 2012, pioneered by its predecessor, Curiosity. But this rover captured its own landing with dedicated cameras and a microphone for the first Mars touchdown.
Three cameras stared up at the parachute to slow it down from supersonic speeds as the craft carrying Perseverance zoomed through the thin Martian atmosphere. When the rover was lowered to the ground by a rocket-powered “sky crane” platform, a fourth camera on the platform captured the descent of the rover. The rover’s other camera looked back at the platform, and a sixth camera looked down at the deck.
The purpose of the same is to see the video and the action of getting down to the surface from high up in the atmosphere,’ says NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer David Gruel, who was the technical lead for that six-camera device, called EDL-Cam. He hopes that every engineer on the team will have a photo of the rover hanging below the descent stage as their screen desktop backdrop six months from now. Since it would take more than 11 minutes for the signals to pass between Earth and Mars, the cameras did not stream the landing film in real time.
After Perseverance landed, engineers concentrated on ensuring that the rover was safe and capable of collecting science data, so the landing videos were not among the first data sent back. Gruel hopes to be able to share what the rover saw four days after he landed on February 22nd
