Anderson Cooper reports on the nerve-wracking Mars landing of the rover Perseverance, the painstaking process of launching the tiny helicopter Ingenuity, and the extraordinary images the two have already sent back to Earth.
Nouveau vaccin Covid-19 - Novavax : analyse et comparaisons francesoir.fr - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from francesoir.fr Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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