NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on Monday released the first high quality video of the entire Perseverance Rover landing on Mars. The 3-minute video shows the rover going down towards the surface of the Red Planet as its big parachute opens to slow down the descent.
Founded in the 1930s the JPL has a huge portfolio of several successful missions across the solar system and beyond. The JPL has worked/is still working on several other Mars projects like the Mars Science Laboratory mission (which includes the Curiosity rover), and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The JPL website also features a timer documenting the time which the Perseverance Rover has spent on Mars’ surface. The timer can be viewed here.
Perseverance is the biggest and the most functional rover the NASA has ever built. Describing the mission of the rover, the JPL reports that, “Perseverance will carry an entirely new subsystem to collect and prepare Martian rocks and soil samples that includes a coring drill on its arm and a rack of sample tubes.”
Adding about the physical components of the rover it describes, “about 30 of these sample tubes will be deposited at select locations for return on a potential future sample-retrieval mission. In laboratories on Earth, specimens from Mars could be analyzed for evidence of past life on Mars and possible health hazards for future human missions.”
