Nail-biting Members of NASA s Mars Perseverance Team on the Thrill of Seeing Rover Land
On 2/25/21 at 5:29 AM EST
Scientists involved in the development of NASA s Mars Perseverance rover have told
Newsweek about the intense emotions they experienced after watching the vehicle safely land on the surface of the Red Planet last Thursday.
The experts, who work across fields ranging from engineering to AI, all spoke about the anxiety and delight involved in sending the rover nearly 300 million miles to Earth s second-closest planetary neighbor.
Nagin Cox serves as a deputy leader for Perseverance s engineering operations team. She wanted to work in the field of robotic space exploration since she was 14 years old, and from her first day at NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cox has written IWWTWTF on the corner of all of her notebooks as a reminder of how badly she wanted to join the team. It means: I was willing to wash the floors.
Microbes | Image used for representational purpose (Photo Credits: Pixabay)
Washington, February 22: As NASA s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars last week, a new study by scientists at the US space agency and German Aerospace Centre has found that some microbes on Earth could temporarily survive on the surface of the Red Planet.
The researchers tested the endurance of micro-organisms to Martian conditions by launching them into the Earth s stratosphere, as it closely represents key conditions on Mars.
Published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, this work paves the way for understanding not only the threat of microbes to space missions, but also the opportunities for resource independence from Earth.
Viral Photo of Earth, Venus and Jupiter Seen From Mars Is a Computer Image
On 2/24/21 at 11:30 AM EST
Since NASA s Perseverance rover touched down on the surface of Mars last week, social media users have claimed the rover took a photo of Earth, Venus, and Jupiter lined up in Mars skyline. But these claims are false.
The image was probably computer-generated using planetarium software in order to recreate an event in which the three planets did indeed align from Mars perspective. But that happened eleven years ago, and no-one got a photo of it.
One tweet, posted on Tuesday, showed the photo with the caption: Earth, Venus and Jupiter as seen from Mars. At the time of writing it had received 35,000 likes and over 5,300 retweets.