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The American space agency has published an astonishing image returned from Mars by its rover Perseverance.
It shows the robot heading for the ground on Thursday to make its landing. It was acquired by the rocket cradle that brought the vehicle to the surface.
Perseverance has a large amount of data in its memory banks which it gradually unloads to Earth.
Among other images, a view from a satellite captures the rover in the parachute phase of its descent.
This is also a huge technical achievement as the satellite – the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – was about 700 km from Perseverance at the time and was traveling at about 3 km / s.
NASA promises more in the coming days.
This offer will include short films shot during the entry, descent and landing (EDL) sequence – with sound.
Perseverance has been put into a near-equatorial Martian crater known as Jezero where it will look for signs of past microbial life.
Adam Steltzner, chief engineer of the rover Perseverance, said the downward view on the robot would become an iconic image in the history of space exploration.
“This is an image of the Perseverance rover suspended under the descent stage, its propulsion backpack, as it descended to the surface of Mars,” he explained.
“You can see the dust raised by the engines. We are probably about 2 meters above the surface of Mars.
“You can see the mechanical clamps that hold the rover below the descent stage – three straight lines running down to the upper deck. And then the looped electrical umbilical which takes all electrical signals from the descent stage to the computer. inside the rover’s belly, [including] those and zeros that represent this image. “
Engineers report that Perseverance is in good health as they are gradually commissioning its systems.
All equipment needs to be evaluated to make sure nothing was damaged during Thursday’s dive in the Martian atmosphere to the ground.
The most detailed images of Jezero crater will come next week after Perseverance raised its navigation mast which carries the main science cameras.
“Once the mast is successfully deployed, which will take place on Saturday, we will proceed by taking a lot of images. We will take a panorama of the rover’s bridge. And we will also do a complete panorama of our landscape around us.”, said Pauline Hwang, head of Perseverance’s strategic surface mission.
Perseverance’s landing technologies nearly destroyed it at the targeted landing zone, about 2 km southeast of what remains of an ancient river delta that formed by a lake. .
He sits on flat ground on the border of two geologic units – a smooth unit under the rover’s wheels that contains dark volcanic rocks; and a rougher unit which contains rocks containing a lot of mineral olivine.
The science team was eager to start exploring the crater, said project assistant scientist Katie Stack Morgan.
Even now, with just that limited first version of photos, there were some fascinating rocks to discuss, she told reporters.
“We choose different colors, tones and textures, to try to understand what these rocks could represent and what deposition process could have put these rocks on the surface of Mars.”
Perseverance’s landing point is in a quadrangle that the science team has informally named Canyon de Chelly after the National Monument for the US state of Arizona. All of the rocks that the robot studies in this 1.2 km by 1.2 km area will also have names related to the American park, famous for its sandstone spire known as Spider Rock.
The $ 2.7 billion (£ 1.9 billion) robot is the fifth rover to be brought to Mars by NASA.
Its initial mission will last for a Martian year (roughly two Earth years), though it’s hard to see the agency fail to expand it if all the material remains healthy.
Besides looking for signs of life, the other key objective of Perseverance is to select and condition rock samples that can be brought back to terrestrial laboratories by subsequent missions.
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