New Delhi: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Monday released the first video and audio from mars.
US Space agency NASA’s Perseverance rover captured a faint crackling of a gust of wind. Nasa’s Mars mission was to search and study for signs of past life.
While landing the microphone was not working in the rover, but when landed it was able to capture the audio on Mars.
“These videos and these images are the stuff of our dreams.”@NASAJPL Entry, Descent, and Landing lead Al Chen reflects on the ground-breaking nature of the videos @NASAPersevere captured during her #CountdownToMars: pic.twitter.com/cyQN0zcWKv
— NASA (@NASA) February 22, 2021
You might have seen photos from Mars, but have you seen high-speed video?
? We captured our @NASAPersevere rover’s final minutes of descent and landing in a way never seen before. Take a look: https://t.co/CQQtlWAzNF pic.twitter.com/uR3dtocwLF
— NASA (@NASA) February 23, 2021
Now that you’ve seen Mars, hear it. Grab some headphones and listen to the first sounds captured by one of my microphones. ?https://t.co/JswvAWC2IP#CountdownToMars
— NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 22, 2021
Engineers of NASA played a 60- second recording.
“What you hear there 10 seconds in is an actual wind gust on the surface of Mars picked up by the microphone and sent back to us here on Earth,” lead engineer for the camera and microphone system on Perseverance, Dave Gruel stated,
The 3 minutes 25 seconds video shows the deployment of a red and white parachute with a 70.5-foot-wide canopy.
The video also shows the heat shield being dropped away after Perseverance’s entry into the Martian atmosphere and the rover’s landing in the Jezero Crater, north region of the equator of the Red Planet.
“This is the first time we’ve ever been able to capture an event like the landing on Mars,” Michael Watkins, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory remarked.
“These are really amazing videos,” Mr. Watkins said. “We binge-watched them all weekend.”
NASA’s associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen stated, “the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit.”
Perseverance’s surface mission manager, Jessica Samuels said that the rover was operating to the full expectations and an intensive check of its systems and instruments were being conducted by engineers.
“I am happy to report that Perseverance is healthy and is continuing with activities as we have been planning them,” Ms. Samuels stated.
She added that the team was preparing for the flight by a small helicopter drone dubbed Ingenuity.
The team is still evaluating,” she said. “We have not locked in a site yet.”
The helicopter drone ‘Ingenuity’ will be attempting the first flight on a different planet and have to achieve lift in an atmosphere, which is just one percent the density in comparison to Earth’s atmosphere.
NASA launched the Perseverance on July 30, 2020 and landed on Red Planet’s surface on Thursday.
The recent mission will be lasting two years but expected to remain operating beyond that. Curiosity, Its predecessor is still functioning after eight years of its Mars landing.
Perseverance will attempt to gather 30 rock and soil samples from Mars in a sealed tube. These tubes will be sent back to Earth for lab analysis in the 2030s.
The craft weighs around a ton, and has seven-foot-long robotic arms, two microphones, has 19 cameras and packed with some cutting–edge instruments.
In the past Mars was warmer and wetter, and it has been determined that the Red Planet was habitable according to the previous exploration. The Perseverance is aimed to determine whether it was actually inhabited.
To study the vapor, it will begin the drilling for its first samples in summer and will be deploying new instruments to scan organic matter, map chemical composition and zap rocks with a laser.
Much like a plant, there will be an experiment conducted that will be converting oxygen from Mars’s carbon dioxide atmosphere.
The main idea behind it is that humans won’t have a need to carry oxygen on future trips, which is crucial for breathing as well as rocket fuel.
Perseverance rover is the fifth to set its wheels on Mars. The first accomplishment was the feat in 1997, and all of them were American.
