Taking the first spin
Two weeks after it landed on the planet, the rover took a short drive on the floor of the massive crater putting a total of 6.5 meters on its odometer during a half-hour test spin on Mars. The rover rolled 4 meters forward, turned about 150 degrees to its left and then drove backwards another 2.5 meters. “It went incredibly well,” Anais Zarifian, a JPL mobility test engineer for Perseverance, said during a teleconference briefing with reporters.
Capturing first audio from another world
Apart from being an astrobiology lab, the rover has been equipped with some of the most high-end instruments to make it as close to a living embodiment. One of those pieces of equipment is a mic that captured the audio of the rover moving on another world. In the audio clip released by the US space agency in March, bangs, pings, and rattles of the six-wheeled rover could be heard clearly. Two versions of the audio clip of the same drive were released by Nasa. A lot of peop
Anderson Cooper: It s done if the parachute doesn t work.
Al Chen: That s right. You know, no one wants to be that the guy the drops the baton.
No landing by a spacecraft has ever been recorded as well as this one. There were six cameras capturing it all from different angles. The parachute deployed. Then the heat shield fell away like a lens cap, and Perseverance got its first look at the ground. This is not a simulation. This is what it looks like to parachute onto Mars.
Anderson Cooper: How fast is it moving at this point?
Al Chen: Yeah, we re still going about 350 miles an hour, and still slowing down
Anderson Cooper goes inside the dramatic missions to Mars by the tiny helicopter Ingenuity and the rover Perseverance for a report airing Sunday on 60 Minutes containing extraordinary footage provided by NASA. He reports that NASA s dramatic landing on the Red Planet in February wasn t as smooth as it may have seemed to people watching at home.
Al Chen, leader of the NASA landing team, tells Cooper that when Perseverance and Ingenuity were falling towards the ground, the team on earth received a signal saying the thrusters needed to slow the spacecraft down might not be working properly. But there was nothing they could do because there was an 11-minute radio delay between Earth and Mars and the spacecraft was programmed to land itself.
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The world rightfully gawked at the engineering prowess of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as it successfully landed the car-sized rover named Perseverance on the surface of Mars. You might think that I, an engineer with experience working on a deep space mission, would be less impressed than most. But trust me: The spacecraft that landed Perseverance was an incredible Rube Goldberg Machine, and I’m going to explain exactly