Perseverance Hardware One Day after Landing

Written by Copernical Team Monday, 01 March 2021 05:58

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Tucson AZ (SPX) Mar 02, 2021

This first HiRISE image of the Perseverance Rover on the surface of Mars also shows many parts of the descent system that got it safely there. Each inset shows an area about 650 feet (200 meters) across. The rover itself sits at the center of a blast pattern created by the hovering skycrane (labeled as "descent stage") that lowered it there. The skycrane flew off to crash as at a safe dist

The rover itself sits at the center of a blast pattern created by the hovering skycrane (labeled as "descent stage") that lowered it there. The skycrane flew off to crash as at a safe distance creating a V-shaped debris pattern that points back toward the rover it came from.

Earlier in the landing sequence, Perseverance jettisoned its heatshield and parachute which crashed in the separate locations illustrated.

These foreign objects on the surface of Mars are highly visible now but will become dustier with time and slowly fade into the background over years. HiRISE will continue to image the Perseverance landing site to track the progress of the rover and changes in the other pieces of hardware that accompanied it.

UPDATE: 1 MARCH 2021
Perseverance can be seen in this enhanced HiRISE color image at its landing site, six days after touchdown, doing system checks. The site appears to be covered in loose dark material with brighter material underneath.

You can see the two bright zones to the sides of the rover that have been scoured clear by the descent stage rockets and the dark material appears to have been funneled outward both in front and behind the rover.

HiRISE can see Perseverance every few days by rolling the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to the side as it passes overhead (eighteen degrees for this image). Perseverance is about 3 by 2.7 meters (10 feet by 9 feet) in size and is about 290 kilometers (180 miles) away from HiRISE in this image.

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