Video and photos of Mars Rover at last!

February 22, 2021 • 2:24 pm

Reader Bryan sent this video from NASA that shows Mars mission experts discussing the landing of Perseverance.  At last we can see some video of the parachute deploying, the head shield falling off, and the skycrane lowering the rover to the surface. It’s amazing! They show video and photos from several cameras.

The discussion still going on, so scroll back to when you start seeing images of the rover module (about -1 hour and 10 minutes when I post this).  Don’t miss this.

18 thoughts on “Video and photos of Mars Rover at last!

  1. I can’t even imagine how they do this. I mean all the work behind this spectacular achievement that is sending a rover to another planet. Fantastic video.

  2. I can nerd out on the stunning engineering for hours–it is such cool stuff. Does anyone know how the sky crane releases the cables and umbilical? I’m sure it is a simple and reliable technology, but I can imagine multiple ways to accomplish this critical task. The connection must be strong, secure, and yet be able to release quickly and cleanly at just the right moment.

    1. I recall hearing that the three tethers are cut by the rover guillotine style. The data cable wasn’t cut, but was designed to pull out from the rover with enough pressure (like pulling out a USB plug) when the sky crane flew away.

    2. They point out the cut cables in one of the rover’s self-portraits. Actually, I believe we saw the same thing with Curiosity which used the same kind of sky crane system.

  3. So many gadgets just for the landing and its documentation. That is amazing.
    So this rover will later collect core samples, and leave them to be picked up and returned to earth in a future mission. At least that is the plan.

  4. Just so dang cool. No matter there might be a civilization out there more advanced than ours, we did really well here.

  5. JPL released a 360-degree view from the landing point perspective you can put into the Google Cardboard viewer :

    … otherwise, one can pan around.

    The feeling looking out at the remote hills in the viewer is soooo cool – I hope they make more of these, and more advanced… I personally can recommend the Google Cardboard viewer (not that I tried other ones) – not used all the time, but when it gets used, it offers quite a different perspective. I mean, that’s literally what it does, so….

  6. Amazing photos .
    On the other hand, the entire history of the landing of rovers on Mars shows how little we can (as humans) in relation to the scale of difficulties in space, distance, etc.

    All s-f books and films exaggerate our real possibilities.

    While the advancement between the horse-drawn carriage, locomotive and rover on Mars is enormous, it is relative.

    I’m not complaining, but I have been reading a lot about cyclical mass extinctions recently and trying to set our real possibilities on the right scale.

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