Perseverance rover beams back images from Mars after historic landing
Mission managers of NASA scientists unveiled images during an online news briefing webcast from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles in less than 24 hours after the landing
NASA's Mars rover Perseverance, the most advanced robotic astrobiology lab ever flown to another world, ended its seven-month, 293-million-mile (470-million-km) journey on Thursday (February 18), by making a successful daredevil landing on the red planet.
Hurtling through space across the last 150,000 miles (240,000 km) of its voyage, Perseverance touched inside a vast basin called Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.
Mission managers of NASA scientists unveiled images during an online news briefing webcast from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles in less than 24 hours after the landing.
The striking early images from the picture-perfect landing of the Mars rover Perseverance, including a selfie of the six-wheeled vehicle dangling just above the surface of the Red Planet moments before touchdown, was snapped by a camera mounted on the rocket-powered "sky crane" descent-stage just above the rover as the car-sized space vehicle was being lowered to Martian soil.
These color photographs, presented below, are likely to become instant classics among memorable images from the history of spaceflight.