Nasa promises more Mars rover images
SCIENTISTS were last night awaiting the next step of Mars rover Perseverance, which successfully landed on the Martian surface last week.
Perseverance has been put in a near-equatorial Martian crater known as Jezero where it will search for signs of past microbial life.
While the remarkable photo of the rover heading down to the ground last Thursday to make its landing has become an iconic shot, the most detailed pictures of the crater will come this week after Perseverance has raised its navigation mast which carries the main science cameras.
Nasa is promising to release movies showing the entry, descent and landing in the next few days.
“Once the mast is successfully deployed we will proceed by taking lots of images. We’ll do a deck panorama of the rover.
“And we’re also going to do a full panorama of our landscape around us,” said Pauline Hwang, Perseverance’s surface strategic mission manager.
Perseverance’s landing technologies put it down almost exactly on the targeted touchdown zone, about 2km from what remains of an ancient river delta. It is sitting on a flat piece of ground at the boundary of two geologic units — a smooth unit under the wheels of the rover that contains dark volcanic rocks; and a rougher unit that has rocks with a lot of the mineral olivine in them.
The science team was itching to start exploring the crater, said deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan.
Even now, with just this limited first release of pictures, there were fascinating rocks to discuss, she said.
“We’re picking out different colours and tones and textures, to try to figure out what these rocks might represent and what depositional process might have put these rocks on the surface of Mars.”