NASA's Perseverance rover touched down safely in Jezero Crater on Mars on 18 February, kicking off a new era of exploration on the red planet in which rocks will be collected and returned to Earth for the first time.
Encased in a protective heat shield, Perseverance whizzed through the thin Martian atmosphere and then deployed a parachute to slow itself down. In a final landing manoeuvre, a 'sky crane' holding the rover fired its rockets to gently lower the six-wheeled, car-sized Perseverance to the surface.
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NASA Perseverance rover: See 'first of its kind' footage from Mars descent on Monday - CNET
The Perseverance rover being lowered to Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. The photo was taken about 20 meters from the ground.
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Wow! See the Perseverance rover dangling above Mars in this amazing landing photo | Space
NASA just released an image showing its Perseverance Mars rover dangling about 6.5 feet (2 meters) above the red dirt during its picture-perfect touchdown inside Jezero Crater yesterday (Feb. 18). The stunning photo was taken by a camera on Perseverance's "sky crane" descent stage, which had nearly finished lowering the SUV-sized robot to the surface on cables at the time.
The image breaks new ground, documenting a Mars landing with detail and immediacy never seen before. It therefore deserves mention with the famous space photos that have moved us all over the years, such as the classic picture of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon in July 1969 and the Hubble Space Telescope's famous " Pillars of Creation " shot, said Adam Steltzner, the chief engineer for Perseverance's mission, which is known as Mars 2020.
The Mars Rover Viral Video Going Around Isn't What It Seems
In this illustration made available by NASA, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover studies a Mars rock ... [+] outrcrop. (NASA/JPL-Caltech via AP)
This photo provided by NASA shows the first color image sent by the Perseverance Mars rover after ... [+] its landing on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021. (NASA/JPL-Caltech via AP)
Getting high-resolution photos and video back to Earth would require more time, as mission leaders had warned for weeks before the landing. There just simply is not a modern broadband network available to instantly zap high-def video files between planets.
Quite a lot has been going on:
NASA says some Earth organisms could temporarily survive on Mars | Engadget
We could unknowingly contaminate Mars and any other world we're exploring in the future with microorganisms from our planet. Scientists from NASA and the German Aerospace Center launched several fungal and bacterial organisms to the stratosphere back in 2019 as part of the MARSBOx experiment.
So, what does Aspergillus niger surviving the trip mean for space travel? As Katharina Siems, a team member from the German Aerospace Center, said:
"With crewed long-term missions to Mars, we need to know how human-associated microorganisms would survive on the Red Planet, as some may pose a health risk to astronauts. In addition, some microbes could be invaluable for space exploration. They could help us produce food and material supplies independently from Earth, which will be crucial when far away from home."
Perseverance Has Landed! Mars Rover Begins a New Era of Exploration - Scientific American
Shortly after 3:44 P.M. Eastern time today, a visitor from Earth fell from a clear, cold Martian sky into a 3.5-billion-year old, 50-kilometer-wide bowl of rock, dust and volcanic ash called Jezero Crater that once held a large lake. Seven minutes earlier, it had touched the top of the planet’s atmosphere at nearly 20,000 kilometers per hour, bleeding off most of its speed through friction, protected from the resulting fireball by a heat shield.
At long last, NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover has arrived. Conceived a decade ago and distilled from the dreams of generations of scientists, the SUV-sized, nuclear-fueled rover launched in July 2020, months into a world-transforming pandemic, traveling nearly a half billion kilometers in seven months and surviving a high-tension seven-minute planetfall from space to reach Jezero Crater—where its real hard work will now begin.
Mars rover could answer questions here on Earth | Science & Technology | unionleader.com
Scientists at the University of New Hampshire are working to determine how fish and plant species are affected by warming ocean waters, and a brother and sister team in the recreational fishing industry say they are finding ways to adapt to the changes they are seeing.
Bitcoin on Tuesday surpassed $50,000 for the first time as institutional investors and businesses fuel a historic run that has sent the digital currency up more than 70% this year.
Why Perseverance Mars Rover Makes Us Happy | Time
Here’s a secret: I am a recovering cynic with recurring pessimistic tendencies. It’s hereditary. On a sunny day, my Irish grandfather would look out the window and say: “We’ll pay for this.” And I won’t even get into the generations of head-spinning drama on the Russian side.
Lately, for all the obvious reasons, it’s been way too easy to fall into compulsive fretting.
Researchers who study awe (and yes, they do, more on that below) describe it as an emotion that arises when “one encounters something so strikingly vast that it provokes a need to update one’s mental schemas.”
Happening on Twitter
Touch down! Nasa's Perseverance rover successfully lands on Mars after seven-month voyage from Earth https://t.co/ttF5ZlPyfa BBCBreaking (from London, UK) Thu Feb 18 21:00:29 +0000 2021
TOUCH DOWN CONFIRMED: NASA's Perseverance rover successfully lands on the surface of Mars! #CountdownToMars… https://t.co/xe43Y5cO2s thesheetztweetz (from Southern California & New York) Thu Feb 18 20:56:45 +0000 2021
NASA's Perseverance Rover is set to touch down on Mars today. Here is the agenda for its initial months. (By… https://t.co/ezVx0wR7OB sciam (from New York City) Thu Feb 18 13:07:21 +0000 2021
It's landing day on Mars! NASA's Perseverance rover will touch down on the Red Planet today https://t.co/OIvIeONECf https://t.co/8UldF0FPNu SPACEdotcom (from NYC) Thu Feb 18 13:05:37 +0000 2021
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