Mars helicopter detects debris from continuous landing

new pictures From an Ingenuity helicopter offers a new perspective on the debris left behind when the Persevering rover touched down on Mars last year, according to NASA. Wednesday.

The perseverance chariot was launched in 2020 landed successfully on the Red Planet in 2021, with a mission to search for ancient signs of life on Mars. I carried the rickshaw Innovative helicopter on board – an experimental project that scientists on the ground hope will be able to see scenes that a rover cannot.

Perseverance went through an arduous process known as the Seven Minutes of Terror to land on Mars. When it reentered the atmosphere, the heat shield helped protect the rover from the intense heat of re-entry and significantly slowed its speed. Next, the huge parachute spread out from the aft cover (the cone-shaped part of the lander), slowing it down even more. At this point, the rear casing and parachute detached from the tenacity and let the landing stage take over, using rocket thrusters and a “sky lift” to gently lower the rover into a smooth landing.

on April 19, Ingenuity took pictures that captured remains The tenacity canopy and the protective rear cover of the rover, which is a cone-shaped part of the landing craft that was carrying The parachute helped protect the rover on its way to the surface. They were scattered all over the site Debris from where the two crashed to the surface after separating from the rover. According to NASA, the rear shell ended up hitting Earth at 78 miles per hour. From the images, it appears that the parachute, the lines connecting the parachute to the spacecraft, and the paint on the outside of the back shell all survived the trip to the surface, NASA says, although more analysis of the images will occur in the future. weeks.

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“Perseverance was the best-documented Mars landing in history, with cameras showing everything from parachute to inflation to landing,” said Ian Clark, a former engineer for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He said on the NASA blog. “The Creativity Images offer a different viewpoint. If they either augment our systems the way we think they worked or provide a single data set of engineering information that we can use to plan the return of a Mars sample, that would be amazing. If not, the images will still be amazing and inspiring.” .

The ingenuity helicopterwhich was published after a month of perseverance, was the first being Achieve a powered journey into another world. Having shown that it can be achieved, Creativity mission extendedIt now works in tandem with Perseverance for Scientific Observations.

Perseverance team is now They are looking to use creativity to help them set a course Perseverance must take To reach the summit of a dry river delta in the Jezero Crater of Mars, which scientists believe is the best opportunity to search for signs of ancient life on the planet.