As NASA had previously detailed, the Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in mid-February, is equipped with a system called the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). This tool is designed to gather local 'weather reports' from the Perseverance rover's location in the Jezero Crater, then send the data back to people on Earth. This week marked the first delivery of such a report.
Did you know that pieces of the original history-making Wright Brothers' "1903 Wright Flyer I" have orbited the Earth and been to moon? Now, NASA collaborated with Carillon Historical Park and the Wright Brothers National Museum to send another piece of the flyer to Mars to take part in another of humanity's historical achievements. The Perseverance rover rolls on Mars now, holding the helicopter craft Ingenuity, onboard which is a piece of the Wright Flyer I's wing fabric.
NASA has announced its plans regarding the small Ingenuity Mars Helicopter that arrived on the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover. According to the space agency, it plans to power on and deploy the helicopter for the first time sometime after April 8, 2021, marking the first attempt to operate an aircraft on another planet.
NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February, is equipped with microphones that, the space agency had said, would enable it to capture noises as it navigated the planet. Only weeks after the landing, NASA is back with the first-ever audio clip of a machine operating on another planet, giving the public a full 16 minutes of raw, unfiltered audio.
On Wednesday, NASA published Perseverance rover's first high-definition panorama of its landing site, giving the public their first proper look at the Martian surface that'll be explored by the new rover. The panorama shows Mars' Jezero Crater as perceived by Perseverance's Mastcam-Z instrument, which can be rotated to capture a full 360-degrees.
After a short, dramatic descent today, NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars, giving the space agency yet another suite of instruments to explore the Red Planet. As NASA previously revealed, Perseverance is carrying with it an experimental first-of-its-kind machine: Ingenuity, the only helicopter humanity has put on another planet.
After months of sailing through space, NASA's Perseverance rover will make its dramatic descent to Mars later this week. This will be another milestone moment for the space agency for a number of reasons, including the first use of an autonomous guided landing on Mars. NASA previously teased us with an animated sequence of the landing, but soon you'll be able to watch it happen live.
NASA has released a dramatic, nearly cinematic 'mission trailer' envisioning what it will look like when its Perseverance rover arrives at Mars next month. The arrival will kick off Perseverance's landing procedures, eventually depositing the rover on the Red Planet where it will conduct many new studies using the latest and greatest instruments.
We're now less than 100 days from the landing of the next NASA-made Mars rover. The remote control vehicle with sample-collecting abilities is called Mars 2020 Perseverance. The mission originally launched from our planet Earth back on July 30, 2020, and it'll land on February 18, 2021. Let's take a peek at what this new rover can do - and what it set out to do in the first place.
NASA is giving its VIPER lunar rover a pair of car-like floodlights that resemble the kind you may mount on your truck or Jeep for off-roading at night. The floodlights will be used to illuminate the darkest parts of the Moon, enabling the VIPER rover to hunt for water in places it would otherwise struggle to see. NASA has shown off one of its floodlight prototypes ahead of the mission.
NASA has designed an interesting new rover that's made up of a pair of two-wheeled vehicles. The rover is called DuAxel, and the design is intended to allow it to descend crater sides and near-vertical clips on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The rover can stop, lower its chassis, and anchor to the ground before splitting in two.
NASA is following in the footsteps of its Apollo days, stating that it has fit its Perseverance rover with a special type of reflector designed to be shot with lasers. The space agency did a similar thing involving retroreflectors on the Moon, which NASA describes as 'essentially small arrays of mirrors.' The idea was that NASA could shoot the reflectors with lasers to get important data on the Moon, something it will eventually replicate with similar reflectors on Mars.