Expertise Seven Minutes of Terror in New Perseverance Mars Rover Touchdown Video

Final week’s pinpoint landing of NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater was historic for a lot of causes, chief amongst them the epochal nature of the mission’s process of looking for indicators of historical life—and caching related samples for eventual return to Earth. However even when the rover finds no proof of Martian microbes throughout its operations, it can have nonetheless produced one other spectacular “first” for the textbooks, which NASA officers unveiled as we speak: An unprecedented take a look at the “seven minutes of terror” between Perseverance’s fiery plunge by way of the planet’s skies and its coming to relaxation on stable floor far beneath. That is the first-ever high-definition video of atmospheric entry, descent and touchdown upon one other world.

Perseverance’s predecessor Curiosity recorded snippets of the ultimate levels of its Mars touchdown in 2012 that resulted in a brief stop-motion video, and in 2005 the Cassini mission’s Huygens lander beamed again photographs and telemetry information from its chilly descent to Saturn’s moon Titan that had been later used to assemble outstanding visualizations. And there’s, after all, no scarcity of lunar touchdown footage from the Apollo missions of yore. However by no means earlier than has a spacecraft captured your complete sequence of an otherworldly touchdown in such lush element. Greater than mere eye sweet, this information may show essential for the design of future, extra bold voyages to the Pink Planet’s floor, which is taken into account to be one of many photo voltaic system’s most technically difficult touchdown locations.

Right here is NASA’s livestream on the footage.

Video credit score: NASA/JPL-Caltech