(GNB Desk): Less than a day after NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover successfully landed on the surface of Mars, NASA released new images from Mars on Friday.
The images were released on Perseverance’s Twitter account and show the car-size robotic explorer shortly before it touched down on the red planet.
“The moment that my team dreamed of for years, now a reality. Dare mighty things,” read one tweet that was accompanied by a picture of the rover in midair right before landing.
A second photo shows the rover hanging from its parachute as it floated over Mars.
The rover touched down just before 4 p.m. ET Thursday, making it NASA’s fifth rover to land on Mars. It will remain there for a two-year mission to roam the red planet in search of signs of ancient microbial life and to collect what could be the first rocky samples from Mars that are sent back to Earth.
The mission will not only help answer questions about the planet’s history and evolution, but is also a critical step in NASA’s goal of sending humans to Mars.
“I’m amazed that everything went pretty much according to plan,” Steve Jurczyk, NASA’s acting administrator, said Thursday in a post-landing news briefing. “When I heard the touchdown signal come back and saw the first image, I cannot tell you how overcome with emotion I was and how happy I was.”
A primary objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology research, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith, paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, according to a statement released by NASA on Thursday.
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis, read in the statement.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet, NASA said.
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