NASA releases stunning new images from Mars
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Updated: 5:47 PM EST Mar 5, 2021
By MARCIA DUNN
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Updated: 5:47 PM EST Mar 5, 2021
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I'm happy to report. Yesterday afternoon, we carried out our very first drive on Mars. Go ahead and show that first picture, Please. They were looking out the front of the rover and you can see our first tracks on Mars. And this is just so amazing to see last night. And we're really happy about this. What you're seeing in this simulation is sexually a representation of the telemetry. We got back of what the arm did on Mars. Of all the different motions of the arm. We call this the no load check out a new stoves and places the whole arm and a vertical orientation. And then it does a test wiggle of each joint, and then it reached us. So here you're seeing the actual images from the rover that we got back at this activity, which was super cool. I should mention the turret has two of our very important science instruments, Sherlock and Pixel. And it also has an engineering camera, Watson. So yeah, Sherlock and Watson will be doing up close losing for us on Mars here. So in salt 12, we deployed the meta wind centers which are housed on the mask and you can see them in testing on Earth on the left and then on the right is a little animated gift of, um, Mars. Sharing each wind. Temps are successfully deploying. So that was that was great to see. You'll see what our first drive actually did yesterday. So our plan, which executed perfectly, was to first drive 4 m forward. That's about 13 ft. Uh, make 100 and 50 degree turn to the left counterclockwise and then back up about 2.5 m about 8 ft. And then during that drive, we took a pause to image the touchdown contact patch on the tires. So where the tires, uh, made contact or the wheels, I should say where the wheels made contact with the ground when we landed. You can see the wheel tracks that we left on Mars. I don't think I've ever been happier to see wheel tracks, and I've seen a lot of them. Um, and this is just a huge milestone for the mission and the mobility team. I am honored and excited to announce that perseverance is landing. Site is now called Octavia e Butler. Landing. This image is from the Mass can be camera located on the robber's mask. It shows a flat, light toned rock on the right side of the image on which we targeted the very first observation from Super Camp, one of the rover's instruments for analyzing the composition of rocks at the surface and what we can see in this image. Uh, from the first high resolution panorama from Mass can see our distant deposits of the jazz row Delta in the background, the rocks in the foreground maybe similar to those in and around the rover's landing site. But I'd like to call attention to the rocks in the mound in the background. This is about a mile and a half away from the rover from the landing site, which is the white dot There were considering two options to get to the delta, a clockwise path in a counterclockwise traverse so you can see here in blue and purple