Mars Rover sends home the daredevil landing movie on the red planet

On Monday, NASA scientists released first-of-a-kind home movies of the adventurous Mars rover landing last week, beautifully displaying its supersonic parachute inflation over the red planet and a rocket-powered hovercraft dropping the research lab to the surface on wheels.

A collection of cameras placed at various angles of the multi-stage spacecraft captured the footage on Thursday as it brought the rover, dubbed Perseverance, to a gentle landing within a large basin called Jezero Crater through the thin Martian atmosphere.

NASA Associate Administrator of Research Thomas Zurbuchen called watching the video "the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting a pressure suit on."

The video montage was played for reporters tuning in to a news briefing webcast from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles four days after the historic landing of the most advanced astrobiology probe ever sent to another world.

NASA also presented a brief audio clip captured by microphones on the rover after its arrival that included the murmur of a light wind gust – the first ever recorded on the fourth planet from the sun.

JPL imaging scientist Justin Maki said NASA’s stationary landing craft InSight, which arrived on Mars in 2018 to study its deep interior, previously measured seismic signals on the planet that were “acoustically driven” and then “rendered as audio.”

But mission deputy project manager Matt Wallace said he believed the Martian breeze represented the first ambient sound directly recorded on the surface of Mars and played back for humans.

The spacecraft’s mics failed to collect useable audio during descent to the crater floor. But they did pick up a mechanical whirring from the rover after its arrival. Wallace said he hoped to record other sounds, such as the rover’s wheels crunching over the surface and its robotic arm drilling for samples of Martian rock.

But it was film footage from the spacecraft’s perilous, self-guided ride through Martian skies to touchdown – an interval NASA has dubbed “the seven minutes of terror” – that JPL’s team found particularly striking.

“These videos, and these images are the stuff of our dreams,” Al Chen, head of the descent and landing team, told reporters. JPL Director Mike Watkins said engineers spent much of the weekend “binge-watching” the footage.

The video, filmed in color at 75 frames a second, shows action in fluid, vivid motion from several angles, the first such imagery ever recorded of a spacecraft landing on another planet, Wallace said.

One of the most dramatic moments is of the red-and-white parachute being shot from a canon-like launch device into the sky above the rover as the spacecraft is hurtling toward the ground at nearly two times the speed of sound.

The chute springs upward, unfurls and fully inflates in less than two seconds, with no evidence of tangling within its 2 miles (3.2 km) of tether lines, Chen said.

A downward-pointing camera shows the heat shield falling away and a sweeping vista of the butterscotch-colored Martian terrain, appearing to shift back and forth as the spacecraft sways under the parachute.

Seconds later, an upward-pointed camera captures the rocket-powered “sky-crane” vehicle, newly jettisoned from the parachute, its thrusters firing but the propellant plumes invisible to the human eye while lowering the rover to a safe landing spot on a harness of tethers.

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A separate camera shows the lowering of the six-wheeled rover from the vantage point of the sky crane, looking downward as Perseverance dangles from its cable harness just over the surface with streams of dust billowing around it at touchdown. The sky crane is then seen flying up and away from the landing site after the harness cables are cut.

NASA released a single still photo of the rover hanging from the sky crane minutes before landing on Friday amid a great deal of fanfare as a precursor to the footage seen on Monday.

A comparatively rudimentary video taken from under the previous rover, Curiosity, during its descent to the planet's surface in 2012 was the only previous moving footage created of a spacecraft during a Mars landing. The stop-motion-like sequence was taken from a single perspective at 3.5 frames per second that showed the ground steadily getting closer but featured no parachute or sky-crane maneuvers images.