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Washington (AP) – The US rover “Perseverance” sent the first videos of its landing and audio recordings from Mars to Earth. Such video and sound recordings have never been made before, the US space agency NASA announced at a press conference on Monday.
“These videos are incredible,” said NASA manager Mike Watkins. “We all saw them many, many times over the weekend.”
The videos show the last eleven kilometers of the “Perseverance” route (in German, for example: stamina). For example, you can see how the parachute opens. The surface the rover lands on is also visible. Microphones aboard the rover did not send any useful data from the landing, but then did send the first sound recordings from the surface of Mars, he said. You can hear something in them that sounds like a gust of wind. New photos were also posted.
The small “Ingenuity” helicopter aboard the rover had previously sent its first status report to the control center in Pasadena, California, and according to NASA experts, it appears to be “working perfectly.” “Wit” (German: wit) is still attached to the bottom of “Perseverance”. But in 30 to 60 days, the helicopter should explore Mars from a bird’s eye view. It would be the first flight of an airplane over another planet.
The “Perseverance” rover, which weighs about 1,000 kilograms and the size of a small car, landed on Thursday – after 203 days of flight and 472 million kilometers – with a risky maneuver in a dry lake called “Jezero Crater.” Perseverance is investigating this lake with a diameter of around 45 kilometers for the next two years.
The development and construction of the roughly $ 2.5 billion (about 2.2 billion euros) rover had taken eight years. It is supposed to look for traces of previous microbial life on Mars and investigate the planet’s climate and geology.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210222-99-549376 / 2
