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Last week, “Perseverance” landed on Mars to the cheers of NASA employees. Now there are the first videos of the rover landing and the first sounds from the planet’s surface.
The American rover “Perseverance” has sent the first videos of its landing, more images and audio recordings from Mars to Earth. Such video and sound recordings have never been made before, the US space agency Nasa said at a news conference Monday.
“These videos are incredible,” said NASA manager Mike Watkins. “We’ve all seen them many, many times over the weekend.” The videos show the last eleven kilometers of the “Perseverance” route. For example, you can see how the parachute opens. The surface the rover lands on is also visible.
You can see the corresponding recordings in the video above – or here.
Microphones aboard the rover did not send any useful data from the landing, but then did send back the first sound recordings recorded 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 to investigate this lake with a diameter of around 45 kilometers during 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.
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