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.
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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In this episode of “Watch this Space,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine discusses NASA’s recent selection of U.S. companies to potentially deliver science payloads to the lunar surface. He also visits the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where he discusses the Mars InSight landing and plans for Mars 2020.
Watch as NASA tests a new parachute for landing the Mars 2020 rover on the Red Planet. On Sept. 7, NASA’s ASPIRE project broke a record when its rocket-launched parachute deployed in 4-10ths of a second—the fastest inflation of this size chute in history: https://go.nasa.gov/2Ro4eAL
Sending a helicopter to Mars, a busy week for our new Administrator, and showcasing how technology enables exploration – a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!
This video is available for download from NASA’s Image and Video Library: https://images.nasa.gov/details-NHQ_2018_0511_A%20Copter%20Companion%20for%20the%20Mars%202020%20Rover%20on%20This%20Week%20@NASA%20%E2%80%93%20May%2011,%202018.html
The team developing NASA’s next rover mission to Mars has received a go-ahead from the agency to proceed with building the rover for launch in 2020. A July 15 Facebook Live event from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory featured updated news about the Mars 2020 rover and its mission. It will be almost identical to the Curiosity rover currently on Mars, but will have enhanced landing technology, the ability to prepare soil and rock samples for return to Earth and microphones to capture sound. The rover will look for signs of past life in a region of the Red Planet where the ancient environment was favorable for microbial life.
