Long-awaited expectations are over; NASA’s diligent rover successfully built it on Tuesday, and yesterday at 3:57 p.m. This is NASA’s fifth rover to successfully land on the Red Planet and it is still the largest and most ambitious Mars mission. To celebrate the huge achievement, the Perseverance Rover brought back its first image about 5 minutes after the touchdown to show the space around it in the Jezero crater. Due to the 11-minute time delay in signals from Mars, we are closest to real-time viewing of Mars.
The Jezero Crater, where the rover consists of the former lake and river delta in search of historical signs of microbial life for the next two years, should provide an ideal opportunity to look for any signs of ancient life on the now uninhabited planet. Extremely sophisticated, its 23 cameras, equipped with microphones and many useful tools for its scientific work, and wait for the helicopter drone (first place!) To support its efforts the next 687 Earth days -23 Mars year – On the Red Planet.
Using a few of its on-board snug cameras, the rover regained control of the mission. It shows the front face of the Mars region with terrain with the shadow of a rover on the ground which seems to be relatively smooth in the hole region. The second image obtained was the mission control, rear-end facing image showing a very similar terrain pattern, but with the rover wheel visible in the lower right-hand corner of the image.
NASA has also released an interactive map showing the perseverance position after the touchdown. The blue circle is the area that the rover will explore for the next two years to collect rocks and to collect regolith for a sample mission that could probably return to Earth if all goes well. February was a very exciting month for Tuesday’s news. Earlier this month, China’s Tianwan-1 space probe reached the orbit of the Red Planet, with the UAE’s Hope mission deciding to send a lander to Earth in May or June. Now that perseverance has removed that excitement with a successful landing, ready to begin the quest to unravel whether life ever existed on Mars.
The NASA mission control team expects higher resolution images from the rover soon with more video equipment and hopes to have the first audio of the rover landing in the next two days. The first official mission of perseverance will begin in about 2 weeks to make sure everything is working and ready to go after Rover’s “check out” period completed.
