#mars2020
Mars 2020 Perseverance mission has launched today on Atlas V rocket. In February 2021 the rover will reach Mars and begin a new chapter in the exploration of the Red Planet.
Learn more about the mission here.
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Perseverance: Some EDL photos I picked out from the rover’s Raw Images page. They’d turned off posting new images over the weekend while putting the big EDL movie together, I guess to ensure today’s release was a big media event. People were mad about that on the internet for a couple of days, but it looks like it’s sorted out now and there are over 4000 images there already, though that includes a bunch they only have thumbnails of so far.
Detail pages for these photos are here: [1][2][3][4]. Image credit for all of these photos: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Perseverance: Amazing descent & landing video taken by the rover’s EDL cameras.
|fovarosiblogsaid:What is hazcam?
Ah, sorry, that’s short for “hazard camera”. These are wide angle cameras the rover uses while driving, to help avoid driving into boulders, falling off cliffs, getting stuck in sand, etc. Perseverance has three stereo pairs of these: Main and backup pairs on the front end of the rover, and a single pair on the back end. As another example of this, you can look at all the latest hazcam images from the Curiosity rover here.
They use these cameras right after landing because most of the others are located on the rover’s camera mast – the thing that kind of looks like the rover’s head and neck – or its arm, and it’ll be a couple of days before they start using either of those.
Perseverance: Rear hazcam photo taken just after landing. Note that the clear lens caps are still on right now; picture quality should improve once those are removed.
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brx0:
Posted this on the wrong Tumblr yesterday because rusty at thisOk, so this little space Tumblr sort of went dormant in January 2019, on account of *gestures wildly at everything*. But NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars tomorrow, with 23(!) cameras and two microphones on board, so I figured this would be a good time to dust it off for a while, at least. The video above is the traditional NASA media event they do before most major launches and landings. I usually skip the media questions part of these; doing that cuts the runtime to around 33 minutes instead of an hour, in case you’re in a hurry or whatever.
If the video isn’t detailed enough, here’s a little light reading to tide everyone over until tomorrow:
- A paper about the rover’s many engineering cameras. The TL;DR there is that 1) landing videos will be from several angles this time: Looking down from the rover, looking up at the parachutes, looking down at the rover from the skycrane stage, etc. Assuming the landing goes well, obviously. And 2) navigation cameras are color this time, for the practical reason that you can’t tell how dusty your rover is with greyscale photos.
- The rover’s eoPortal entry ended up being so detailed they split a couple of sub-pages off of it.
- A paper on how you go about choosing a place to land on Mars. Which is not trivial when your project team includes hundreds of scientists across the globe, most of whom have important, strongly-held professional opinions about exactly where and where not to go. Along with hundreds of engineers trying to explain why various things the science folks want are either risky or impossible. TL;DR: There were meetings. Many, many, many meetings. (doc is 87 pages.)
Bravo, #nasaperseverance #perseverance #perseverancerover #mars2020 @nasa @nasa_persevere !!!
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