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For The Washington Post 
1 hour ago
Sarah Kaplan
Washington – In one photo, the rover’s wheels sit on a patch of reddish dust speckled with pebbles. In another, there is a group of small rocks filled with holes like sponges.
That dark feature in the distance, could it be a cliff? Were these deposits formed from a volcanic eruption or are they sediments left behind by vanished water?
In the 24 hours since NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars on Thursday, scientists and engineers have been eagerly scrutinizing every image it sends back to Earth. The mission to search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet has been in the works for years. Now, images of the dangerous descent and the rover’s perfect landing offer the first clues to the place they have chosen to explore.
In the coming days and weeks, engineers will begin to implement the sophisticated cameras and other instruments that can reveal the composition of the rocks and the history of the surrounding landscape. It will take scientists years, if not decades, to determine whether life ever inhabited here.
For now, they are happy looking at the photos.
Scientists were left almost speechless by the image taken on Thursday from the rocket-powered descent stage of the rover, just seconds before the robot gently lowered to the ground.
In the photo, the rover hangs on four cables, its six wheels positioned just 20 feet above the rocky surface. An electronic umbilical cord spirals up to an invisible spacecraft, while plumes of dust rise as the vehicle approaches.
“Clarity and reality,” Pauline Hwang, strategic mission manager for the rover’s surface operations, told a news conference Friday. A veteran of four missions to Mars, Hwang has seen her share of landings. But this was the first time a camera had captured some of the “seven minutes of terror” that occur between the second a spacecraft enters the atmosphere of Mars and the moment it lands.
“It just, it was just, it was amazing,” Hwang said. “All of us just stared in awe last night.”
NASA also released an image on Friday taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite located above the Perseverance landing site in Jezero crater. It shows the faint bright blur of the spaceship hurtling over the vast desolation of the Red Planet.
The first images taken by the rover’s engineering cameras show the robot positioned on relatively flat terrain.
“When I look at this image in the first place, I feel a great sense of relief,” Aaron Stehura, engineer of the entry, descent and landing flight system said Friday. “I see a landing site that seems relatively safe.”
The place has enormous scientific importance. The rocks below the rover date to more than 3.5 billion years ago, when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on its surface, said project associate scientist Katie Stack Morgan. Back then, a delta of a sprawling river spilled into a lake that filled the Jezero crater. If any microorganisms were to swim in those waters, their fossils could be preserved in the sediments that accumulated in the delta.
When the first images of Perseverance appeared overnight, “our talks lit up with science teams saying, ‘Look here,'” Stack Morgan said Friday. “We are selecting different colors, tones and textures, trying to figure out what these rocks could represent.”
And they are already debating which route the rover should take to reach the delta cliffs.
“Between us and the delta, we have a lot of interesting science to do,” Stack Morgan said.
Landing on Mars is very difficult; about half of all missions to the planet have failed. But Perseverance is the ninth NASA spacecraft to reach the surface of the Red Planet. It is also the second mission to use the ambitious “overhead crane” technique.
The Perseverance voyage will be better documented than any other interplanetary mission in NASA history. There are 19 cameras on the rover, plus four more on parts of the spacecraft involved in Thursday’s entry, descent and landing. NASA hopes to release a video of the terrifying landing process in the next few days.
The microphones attached to the rover were set up to record the spacecraft’s arrival on the Red Planet and capture the sound during its mission. Stehura said Friday that it is not yet clear whether the microphones captured audio during the descent.
Perseverance’s machinery is in good condition, Hwang reported on Friday. Engineers have launched the high-gain antenna that it will use to communicate with Earth. Soon, they will order the rover to raise its head (called the mast) and begin photographing its surroundings with more powerful cameras.
Once the rover has received a software update and a certificate of good health, it will head to a flat spot that can serve as a landing pad for the small experimental helicopter that climbed onto the robot’s belly. Engineers will spend about 30 days testing the helicopter, called Ingenuity, the first motorized, controlled flight experiment on another planet.
Then, Perseverance will spend at least the next two years traversing the landscape in search of potential fossil-bearing rocks, which it will collect and store in sterilized tubes. NASA and the European Space Agency are in the early stages of designing follow-up missions to retrieve the sample tubes and return them to Earth, where they can be studied in state-of-the-art laboratories.
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