NASA’s Perseverance Rover Cameras Capture Mars Like Never Before
September 24, 2021 | NASA JPLEstimated reading time: 1 minute
NASA’s Perseverance rover has been exploring Jezero Crater for more than 217 Earth days (211 Martian days, or sols), and the dusty rocks there are beginning to tell their story – about a volatile young Mars flowing with lava and water.
That story, stretching billions of years into the past, is unfolding thanks in large part to the seven powerful science cameras aboard Perseverance. Able to home in on small features from great distances, take in vast sweeps of Martian landscape, and magnify tiny rock granules, these specialized cameras also help the rover team determine which rock samples offer the best chance to learn whether microscopic life ever existed on the Red Planet.
Altogether, some 800 scientists and engineers around the world make up the larger Perseverance team. That includes smaller teams, from a few dozen to as many as 100, for each of the rover’s cameras and instruments. And the teams behind the cameras must coordinate each decision about what to image.
“The imaging cameras are a huge piece of everything,” said Vivian Sun, the co-lead for Perseverance’s first science campaign at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We use a lot of them every single day for science. They’re absolutely mission-critical.”
Suggested Items
NASA Sets Path to Return Mars Samples, Seeks Innovative Designs
04/16/2024 | NASANASA Administrator Bill Nelson shared on Monday the agency’s path forward on the Mars Sample Return program, including seeking innovative designs to return valuable samples from Mars to Earth.
NASA, Japan Advance Space Cooperation, Sign Agreement for Lunar Rover
04/11/2024 | NASANASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Japan’s Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Masahito Moriyama have signed an agreement to advance sustainable human exploration of the Moon.
NASA Uses ORNL Supercomputers to Plan Smooth Landing on Mars
03/26/2024 | Oak Ridge National LaboratoryA U.S. mission to land astronauts on the surface of Mars will be unlike any other extraterrestrial landing ever undertaken by NASA.
RTX's Raytheon Completes First Flight Test for New AMRAAM-ER Variant
03/05/2024 | RTXRaytheon, an RTX business, and Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, with support from the Norwegian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and Armed Forces, successfully completed a flight test of an updated AMRAAM®-Extended Range missile variant from a National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS).
Terran Orbital’s CAPSTONE Nanosatellite Exceeds Expectations
02/22/2024 | BUSINESS WIRETerran Orbital Corporation, a global leader in satellite-based solutions primarily serving the aerospace and defense industries, announced that its 12U nanosatellite built for Advanced Space’s CAPSTONE™ (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) mission in support of NASA, has surpassed 450 days in orbit around the moon.