Mars Rover captures selfie before landing on the Mars
Mars rover surprisingly captured a selfie snap of a six-wheeled vehicle hanging around the surface just before landing on the Martian soil. The NASA scientists on Friday presented striking early images from the picture-perfect landing of the Mars rover Perseverance.
It’s once in a while to receive such a memorable image. It is for the first time in the history of spaceflight, was snapped by a camera mounted on the rocket-powered “sky crane” descent-stage just above the rover as the car-sized space vehicle was being lowered on Thursday to Martian soil.
The image was revealed by the mission manager during an online news briefing for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles less than 24 hours after the landing.
The picture, looking down on the rover, shows the entire vehicle suspended from three cables unspooled from the sky crane, along with an “umbilical” communications cord. Swirls of dust kicked up by the crane’s rocket thrusters are also visible.
“This is something we’ve never seen before,” Aaron Stehura, a deputy lead for the mission’s descent and landing team, describing himself and colleagues as “awe-struck” when first viewing the image.
Adam Steltzner, the chief engineer for the Perseverance project at JPL, said he found the image instantly iconic, comparable to the shot of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon in 1969, or the Voyager 1 probe’s images of Saturn in 1980.
