NASA said on Wednesday that new images from the Ingenuity helicopter provide a new perspective on the wreckage left behind when the Perseverance rover landed on Mars last year.
The Perseverance rover, launched in 2020, successfully landed on Mars in 2021, with the mission of discovering ancient signs of life on Mars.
The rover was carrying the Ingenuity helicopter, an experimental project that Earth scientists hoped would be able to see sights that the rover couldn’t.
Perseverance underwent a grueling process known as the seven minutes of terror in order to reach the Martian surface. A heat shield helped protect the rover from the blistering heat of reentry and significantly slowed it down as it entered the atmosphere.
The massive parachute then deployed from the backshell (a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle), further slowing it down.
The backshell and parachute detached from Perseverance at this point, allowing the descent stage to take over, using rocket thrusters and a “sky crane” to gently lower the rover to a smooth landing.
On April 19th, Ingenuity photographed the remains of Perseverance’s parachute as well as the rover’s protective backshell, a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle that carried the parachute and protected the rover on its way to the surface.
According to NASA, the backshell hit the ground at a speed of about 78 miles per hour.
According to NASA, the parachute, the lines connecting the parachute to the spacecraft, and the coating on the outside of the backshell all survived the trip to the surface, though further analysis of the images will take place in the coming weeks.
“Perseverance had the best-documented Mars landing in history, with cameras showing everything from parachute to inflation to touchdown,” Ian Clark, a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, wrote in a NASA blog post.
“The photographs by Ingenuity provide a unique perspective. It would be incredible if they could either confirm that our systems worked as we thought they did or provide even one dataset of engineering information for Mars Sample Return planning.
And even if they aren’t, the images are stunning and inspiring.”
The Ingenuity helicopter, which was launched a month after Perseverance, was the first object to achieve powered flight on another planet.
After it became clear that this was possible, Ingenuity’s mission was expanded, and it now collaborates with Perseverance on scientific observations.
To read our blog on “On Mars, enigmatic rocks reveal indications of a violent genesis,” click here
