Perseverance Mars Landing Brings New Dimension to Space Exploration

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The first photo taken through Perseverance’s cameras on Feb. 18 following the rover’s landing on Mars.

Lexi Nielsen, Reviews Editor

On Feb. 18, the Perseverance Rover, formerly called Mars 2020, became the first artificial object to land on Mars since the Insight Mars landed in 2018. It was the first rover to land since Curiosity touched down in 2012. Perseverance is the largest, most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world.

With new technology, NASA was able to provide a high-resolution, full-color video of Perseverance’s landing on Mars. The video shows the dramatic landing from the moment Perseverance entered Mars’ atmosphere to the moment the rover landed on the surface of Mars.

The engineers who worked on the Perseverance Rover installed a new terrain relative navigation system in Perseverance to identify a safe landing spot on Mars. Essentially, it scanned and analyzed the terrain, then matched it up with maps in its database to prepare for a touchdown.

Landing a rover on Mars is not an easy task to complete. In fact, the task is so difficult that space engineers often refer to it as “seven minutes of terror.” To ensure the rover would land safely on Mars, the engineers had to install a protective heat shield to slow it down as it traveled at 12,000 miles per hour through the Martian atmosphere, a 70-foot diameter parachute to slow the craft further, and a hovering-landing sky crane system to lower the rover the rest of the way to the ground for a soft, gentle landing.

Thanks to new cameras, NASA can access pictures and videos through Perseverance on Mars. With the most advanced technology on a rover yet, this is the first time anyone has heard a sound on another planet, and NASA is uploading photos to Twitter through an account called NASAPerseverance.

With someone pretending to speak as the rover on Mars, the tweets include “Perseverance’s thoughts” as it looks around the foreign world. The account is also there to keep science enthusiasts updated on NASA’s latest discoveries on Mars, and show the new planet through the lens of Perseverance’s cameras.

With Perseverance landing safely on Mars and being the most advanced rover the world has ever seen, NASA promises to provide discoveries and shed light on parts of the universe the world has never seen before.