Enlarge / The rocks of Kodiak Butte record a lot of the history of Jezero Crater. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS) Normally, it takes some time for NASA’s Mars rovers to return scientific data. The instruments need to be calibrated and commissioned, and the rover needs to move off from the landing site toward a bit of the […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA) Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover shot for a new milestone in the search for extraterrestrial life: drilling into Mars to extract a plug of rock, which will eventually get fired back to Earth for scientists to study. Data sent to NASA scientists early on August 6 indicated a victory—the robot had indeed […]
NASA’s Mars helicopter has now completed nine flights. (credit: NASA) On Monday, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter made its ninth and most ambitious flight yet. This time, the space agency said, the tiny flier took to the skies for 166.4 seconds and reached a maximum speed of 5 m/s. This is equivalent to 10 mph, or a […]
Enlarge / NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen here in a close-up taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA has resolved the issues with its Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars and is ready to fly. The space agency announced on Saturday that it will attempt […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) On Tuesday, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hosted a press conference where it detailed the plans for the Ingenuity drone that hitched a ride to Mars attached to the underside of the Perseverance rover. The scientists and engineers behind the drone announced that they’ve now picked a site for what is expected […]
Enlarge / Perseverance’s two Mastcam-Z imagers (in the gray boxes) are part of the rover’s remote sensing mast. (credit: NASA) The seven minutes of terror are over. The parachute deployed; the skycrane rockets fired. Robot truck goes ping! Perseverance, a rover built by humans to do science 128 million miles away, is wheels-down on Mars. […]
Panoramic image of Mars taken by Perseverance on February 20, 2021. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Never before, in all of our millions of years, have humans directly observed a spacecraft landing on another planet. Until now. On Monday, NASA released a video (embedded below) that included several viewpoints from the descent of Mars Perseverance to the surface […]
Enlarge / Perseverance has landed about two kilometers from a delta system, shown in the upper left of this image. In their first press conference following Perseverance’s successful landing on Mars, NASA and JPL scientists revealed some information on where the rover landed and what to expect for the next several days and weeks as […]