NASA on Monday released the first high-quality video of a spacecraft landing on Mars, a three-minute trailer showing the enormous orange and white parachute hurtling open and the red dust kicking up as rocket engines lowered the rover to the surface.
The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293m miles (472m km) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000mph (19,000km/h) to begin its approach to touchdown on Mars, with the help of a parachute, booster rockets and a sky crane.
Perseverance – fondly known as Percy – landed with “eyes open” taking images of the surface to choose its landing spot. Weighing more than a tonne, it landed nearly in the middle of the landing zone inside the 28 mile-wide (45km) Jezero crater north of the planet’s equator, which billions of years ago is believed to have housed a Martian lake bed.
Perseverance, NASA’s most sophisticated rover yet, will search for signs of ancient life on Mars.
“These videos and these images are the stuff of our dreams,” said Al Chen, who was in charge of the landing team.
The camera system covers the whole process, from the moment of parachute inflation to the descent process, showing some of the rover’s intense ride to Mar’s Jezero Crater.
The footage from the high-definition cameras aboard shows the spacecraft starts 7 miles (11 kilometres) above the surface.
It also showed the supersonic deployment of the massive parachute ever sent to another planet and ends with the rover’s touchdown in the crater. A microphone attached to the rover did not collect any usable data during the descent but survived the highly dynamic descent to the surface and obtained sounds from Jezero Crater on Feb. 20. A Martian breeze is audible for 10 seconds into the 60-second recording.
