Just Released: Perseverance’s First Video of Mars
And the stunning images and audio it’s sent us so far
It was the most difficult landing ever attempted by a spacecraft on Mars. While it was also the most advanced rover to date, the room of scientists and reporters were nonetheless tense as Perseverance entered the Martian atmosphere. I joined them via the livestream, my sister and I holding hands as we watched the screen. It began its descent. The parachutes deployed, the heat shield abandoned, the rover headed towards the dust-licked spiny outline of Jezero crater. Video taken by a camera aboard the descent stage captured the rover’s landing. While data from the full video took a while to send and process here on Earth, this still image offered a tempting high-resolution preview.
Just like with Curiosity nine years ago, the floating body of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter watched Perseverance’s careful sweep into its landing site. An image produced from the orbiter’s High Resolution Camera Experiment (HiRISE) is shown below with Perseverance as a small bright dot, another luminous point overhead marking the deployed parachute. Underneath, a white circle encloses Perseverance’s targeted landing spot.
