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JPY Weekly Review (Feb. 15 – 19)
Elated NASA scientists Friday pored through the first landing scenes transmitted by the space agency’s Perseverance rover on Mars.
In the most dramatic image, a camera aboard the Perseverance landing system captured a close-up of the one-ton six-wheeled mobile robot suspended just a few yards above the surface of the red planet, where it successfully touched down Thursday, after a 292-million-mile journey from Earth.
Hanging from the cables used to lower it from the lander to the ground, the rover resembled a high-tech marionette dangling on strings.
“You can see the dust kicked up by the rovers’ engines,” said Adam Steltzner, Perseverance chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It was stunning and the team was awestruck. And, you know, there is just a feeling of victory that we were able to take these.”
As it prospects for past life on Mars over the next two years, NASA’s $2.7 billion rover will be transmitting a vast portfolio of high-resolution images, panoramic views and 3-D color stereo landscapes back to mission engineers and scientists.
