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LOS ANGELES: NASA scientists on Friday presented striking first images of the perfect landing of the March vagabond Perseverance, including a selfie of the six-wheeled vehicle suspended just above the surface of the red planet moments before landing.
Color photography, likely to become an instant classic among memorable images in space flight history, was taken by a camera mounted on the rocket. “sky crane“descent step just above the rover as the car-sized spacecraft descended on Martian soil on Thursday.
The image was revealed by mission officials during an online briefing webcast from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles less than 24 hours after landing.
The photo, looking down on the rover, shows the entire vehicle suspended from three unwound cables from the Celestial Crane, with an “umbilical” communication cord. Dust swirls raised by the crane rocket the thrusters are also visible.
Seconds later, the rover was gently planted on its wheels, its tethers severed, and the Celestial Crane – its job done – took off to crash from a safe distance, but not before the photos and other data collected during the descent was transmitted to the rover for safekeeping.
The image of the suspended science lab, striking in its clarity and sense of movement, marks the first such close-up photo of a spacecraft landing on Mars, or on a planet beyond Earth.
“It’s something we’ve never seen before,” Aaron Stehura, deputy chief of the mission’s descent and landing team, describing himself and his colleagues as “impressed” upon first viewing of the image.
AT ONCE ICONIC
Adam Steltzner, chief engineer for Project Perseverance at JPL, said he found the image instantly iconic, comparable to the photo of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz aldrin standing on the moon in 1969, or the images of Saturn from the Voyager 1 probe in 1980.
He said the viewer was linked with a defining moment that depicted years of work by thousands of individuals.
“You are brought to the surface of Mars. You are sitting there, seven meters from the surface of the rover looking down,” he said. “It’s absolutely exhilarating, and it evokes these other images of our experience as humans moving through our solar system.”
The image was taken at the very end of the so-called “seven minutes of terror” descent sequence that brought perseverance from the top of Mars’ atmosphere, traveling at 12,000 miles per hour, to a soft touch on the floor of a large basin called the Jezero Crater.
Next week, NASA hopes to feature more photos and videos – some possibly with audio – taken by the six cameras attached to the descending spacecraft, showing more of the celestial crane maneuvers, as well as the deployment of the supersonic parachute that preceded him.
Pauline Hwang, head of the strategic mission, said the rover itself “is doing great and healthy on the surface of Mars, and continues to be very functional and awesome.”
The vehicle landed about two kilometers from high cliffs at the foot of an ancient river delta carved out of the corner of the crater billions of years ago, when Mars was hotter, wetter and presumably hospitable to life.
Scientists say the site is ideal for pursuing Perseverance’s main purpose – to search for fossilized traces of microbial life preserved in sediment that is believed to have been deposited around the delta and the long-extinct lake it once fed.
Rock samples drilled in Martian soil must be stored on the surface for possible recovery and delivery to Earth by two future robotic missions to the Red Planet, as early as 2031.
Another color photo released Friday, captured moments after the rover arrived, shows a rocky expanse of land around the landing site and what appear to be the delta cliffs in the distance.
The mission surface team will spend the days and weeks ahead detaching, deploying and testing the robot arm, communication antennas and other vehicle equipment, aligning instruments and upgrading the rover’s software. , Hwang said.
She said it would take about nine “sols”, or Martian days, before the rover was ready for its first test ride.
One of Perseverance’s tasks before embarking on its search for signs of microbial life will be to deploy a miniature helicopter that it transported to Mars for an unprecedented alien test flight. But Hwang said that effort was still about two months away.
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