Perseverance Mars Landing Caught with Both Video and Sound

If you haven’t yet seen it. You can view the compiled video images synched to the JPL audio from the command centre here. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science describes it as “the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit.”

Covering 230 seconds the video shows the spacecraft entering the Martian atmosphere at 20,100 kilometers per hour (12,500 mph) followed by the deployment of its parachute, the dropping of the heat shield, the swaying during descent as we see the Martian landscape approach from below, the rapid deceleration, the firing of the rockets from the sky crane-jetpack, the lowering of the rover to the surface, and the sky crane flying away to crash at a safe distance.

Lead engineer for Mars 2020, Dave Gruel describes the technology used to capture these stunning video images. The spacecraft deployed five commercial off-the-shelf cameras on three different spacecraft components to capture the images seen in the video. Two of the cameras were on the shell that protected the spacecraft during transit from Earth to Mars. They took pictures of the parachute releasing and inflating. A camera facing downward from the descent stage captured the images of the Martian surface swaying to and fro. And then cameras on the rover itself captured up and down images during the sky crane maneuver and fly away. Gruel, on the NASA website, states, “We put the…camera system on the spacecraft not only for the opportunity to gain a better understanding of our spacecraft’s performance….but also because we wanted to take the public along for the ride.”

The image featured with this article is one that was captured of the rover being lowered by the sky crane maneuver to the surface of Mars. It has not yet touched down and is hovering a few meters above the ground prior to the tethers being released. You can see Martian dust b