NASA will host a briefing to provide highlights from the first year-and-a-half of the Perseverance rover’s exploration of Mars.
The rover landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021 and is collecting samples of rock and other materials from the Martian surface. Perseverance is investigating the sediment-rich ancient river delta in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater.
Speakers: • Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters • Laurie Leshin, JPL director • Rick Welch, Perseverance deputy project manager, JPL • Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist, Caltech • Sunanda Sharma, Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) scientist, JPL • David Shuster, Perseverance returned sample scientist, University of California, Berkeley
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance mission captured thrilling footage of its rover landing in Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. The real footage in this video was captured by several cameras that are part of the rover’s entry, descent, and landing suite. The views include a camera looking down from the spacecraft’s descent stage (a kind of rocket-powered jet pack that helps fly the rover to its landing site), a camera on the rover looking up at the descent stage, a camera on the top of the aeroshell (a capsule protecting the rover) looking up at that parachute, and a camera on the bottom of the rover looking down at the Martian surface.
The audio embedded in the video comes from the mission control call-outs during entry, descent, and landing.
Astrobiologists study ancient lakes on Earth in order to help us search for life in our solar system and beyond. Subscribe to our “Gravity Assist” podcast for this episode and more: www.nasa.gov/gravityassist
As the Perseverance Rover flies toward Jezero Crater on Mars, which once hosted water, astrobiologists are interested in places on Earth that are similar to the rover landing site. Kennda Lynch, scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, has been doing fieldwork in an ancient lake location in Utah called the Pilot Valley Playa. In this episode of Gravity Assist, she describes her recent discoveries and why she’s excited about Perseverance. She also explains how all life forms create waste products, even bacteria, that could leave tracers or “biosignatures” for scientists to detect. By looking at how microbes survive in extreme environments on Earth, scientists can explore the bigger question of how life could sustain itself on other planetary bodies like Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Image Credits:
NASA
Vox/ YouTube Original -“Glad You Asked”
Brocken Inaglory/Wikimedia Commons
Alexander Gerst/Wikimedia Commons
Paul Hermans/Wikimedia Commons
This video shows Jezero crater, the landing site of the @NASA Mars 2020 Perseverance rover on the Red Planet, based on images from ESA’s Mars Express mission. The planned landing area is marked with an orange ellipse.
Scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 30 July 2020 on board an Atlas V rocket, the Perseverance rover will land on 18 February 2021 in Jezero crater.
An impact crater with a diameter of about 45 km, Jezero is located at the rim of the giant Isidis impact basin. Morphological evidence suggests that the crater once hosted a lake, some 3.5 billion years ago.
Jezero possesses an inlet- and an outlet channel. The inlet channel discharges into a fan-delta deposit, containing water-rich minerals such as smectite clays. Scientists believe that the lake was relatively long lived because the delta may have required 1 to 10 million years to reach its thickness and size. Other studies conclude that the lake did not experience periods of important water-level fluctuations and that it was formed by a continuous surface runoff. This makes Jezero crater to a prime target for the search for potential signs of microbial life, because organic molecules are very well preserved in river deltas and lake sediments.
The animation was created using an image mosaic made from four single orbit observations obtained by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on Mars Express between 2004 and 2008. The mosaic combines data from the HRSC nadir and colour channels; the nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface. The mosaic image was then combined with topography information from the stereo channels of HRSC to generate a three-dimensional landscape, which was then recorded from different perspectives, as with a movie camera, to render the flight shown in the video.
Copyright:
Animation: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Music: Björn Schreiner
Soundtrack logo: Alicia Neesemann
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