NASA releases 1st audio from Mars, video of Rover’s landing   

NASA has released a new video from its Mars 2020 Perseverance rover which chronicles major milestones during the final minutes of its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet on February 18. A microphone on the rover also has provided the first audio recording of sounds from Mars.

About 10 seconds into the 60-second recording, a Martian breeze is audible for a few seconds, as are mechanical sounds of the rover operating on the surface.

From the moment of parachute inflation, the camera system covers the entirety of the descent process, showing some of the rover’s intense ride to Mars’ Jezero Crater.

“For those who wonder how you land on Mars – or why it is so difficult – or how cool it would be to do so – you need look no further,” Acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk said in a statement.

The world’s most intimate view of a Mars landing begins about 230 seconds after the spacecraft entered the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere at 20,100 e kilometre per hour. The video opens in black, with the camera lens still covered within the parachute compartment.

Within less than a second, the spacecraft’s parachute deploys and transforms from a compressed 46-by-66 centimetre cylinder of nylon, Technora, and Kevlar into a fully inflated 21.5-meter-wide canopy — the largest ever sent to Mars.

The video also captures the heat shield dropping away after protecting Perseverance from scorching temperatures during its entry into the Martian atmosphere.

The footage ends with Perseverance’s aluminium wheels making contact with the surface at 2.6 kph, and then pyrotechnically fired blades sever the cables connecting it to the still-hovering descent stage.

A key objective of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life.