Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech
It’s not long now until the most ambitious mission humans have sent to another planet reaches its destination. On February 18, the world will watch in astonishment as the Perseverance rover descends upon the Jezero crater, hopefully opening a whole new chapter in space exploration.
And because of the many cameras on board (23 of them, the most any interplanetary mission ever had), we’ll get to experience the whole landing thing in high definition - not in real-time, true, but still raw, as it's sent from millions of miles away.
To give us a taste of what we’re about to see, the American space agency released in December a short trailer of the landing, and even if the third-person approach we see here is not what we’ll actually get (all the 23 cameras are on the rover and its lander, not on the planet or in space to capture the moment), it’s still an incredible experience – see for yourself below.
NASA is planning to make a real spectacle out of the landing next month. To that end, it will try to capture the world’s attention through the mission’s website, where all the images will be published as soon as they come in.
"We're working on our last adjustments to put Perseverance in perfect position to land in one of the most interesting places on Mars," said in a statement in December Fernando Abilleira, deputy mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The team can't wait to put these wheels in some Martian dirt."
Perseverance is based on the same platform as the Curiosity rover and, once deployed, will start its many and complicated missions. Among them, the search for signs of life, the tracking of natural resources and hazards, or the assessment of the habitability of the environment. It will even go as far as to try and generate oxygen in what could be the first attempt at terraforming.
To give us a taste of what we’re about to see, the American space agency released in December a short trailer of the landing, and even if the third-person approach we see here is not what we’ll actually get (all the 23 cameras are on the rover and its lander, not on the planet or in space to capture the moment), it’s still an incredible experience – see for yourself below.
NASA is planning to make a real spectacle out of the landing next month. To that end, it will try to capture the world’s attention through the mission’s website, where all the images will be published as soon as they come in.
"We're working on our last adjustments to put Perseverance in perfect position to land in one of the most interesting places on Mars," said in a statement in December Fernando Abilleira, deputy mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The team can't wait to put these wheels in some Martian dirt."
Perseverance is based on the same platform as the Curiosity rover and, once deployed, will start its many and complicated missions. Among them, the search for signs of life, the tracking of natural resources and hazards, or the assessment of the habitability of the environment. It will even go as far as to try and generate oxygen in what could be the first attempt at terraforming.
Google News