Never before seen footage of rover descended through the Martian atmosphere
Courtesy of NASA, now everyone can see firsthand how the Perseverance Mars Rover landed on the red planet. Launch in July of 2020 it reached it final destination on Thursday, February 18, 2021, at the landing site in Jezero Crater.
The video of the landing has already provided what were, undoubtedly, some of the most iconic visuals we have seen in the history of space exploration. Yet the Perseverance is only just getting started as its primary mission will be to search for signs of life (or rather to find out if remnants of past microbial life prove that it ever existed).
In a press conference, Michael Watkins the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said:
“This is the first time we’ve been able to actually capture an event like the landing of a spacecraft on Mars,” he continued, “We will learn something by looking at the performance of the vehicle in these videos. But a lot of it is also to bring you along on our journey, our touchdown to Mars, and of course, our surface mission as well. These are really amazing videos.”
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In addition to the impressive photos that the cameras on the Mars rover has taken thus far, it also was equipped with two microphones that was able to capture the sounds of the wind blowing on the surface of Mars that you can listen to via soundcloud.