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Mars Exploration 1: Unmanned Missions (Probes; Rovers; etc.)

Perseverance has landed ...
 
The first image has been received. Higher-resolution images to follow ...
 
Boy that was tense.

Still, something for future archaeologists to delight over.
 
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This is fantastic news! This landing system definitely works.
 
I watched the live feed from NASA too - it was very tense.

It's a shame we couldn't see the sky crane deploying and what not. Also a shame that there wasn't a live feed from the sky crane at all.
 
You would have thought with the amount of money they spent they could have afforded a colour camera lol
 
The black and white camera is for navigation. It has other cameras in colour.
 
... It's a shame we couldn't see the sky crane deploying and what not. ...

Do you mean it's a shame we didn't get to see something like this:

PerseveranceHanging2Land.jpeg

Yes - it's an actual photo of the rover being lowered onto the surface by the sky crane module ...
Mars landing team ‘awestruck’ by photo of descending rover

The world got its first close-up look at a Mars landing on Friday, as NASA released a stunning picture of its newest rover being lowered onto the dusty red surface.

The photo was released less than 24 hours after the Perseverance rover successfully touched down near an ancient river delta, where it will search for signs of ancient life and set aside the most promising rock samples for return to Earth in a decade.

NASA equipped the spacecraft with a record 25 cameras and two microphones, many of which were turned on during Thursday’s descent.

The rover is shown in stunning detail just 6 1/2 feet (2 meters) off the ground, being lowered by cables attached to an overhead sky crane, the red dust kicked up by rocket engines. NASA promises more photos in the next few days and possibly also an audio recording of the descent. ...

“This is something that we’ve never seen before,” flight system engineer Aaron Stehura noted at a news conference. “It was stunning, and the team was awestruck. There’s just a feeling of victory that we were able to capture these and share it with the world.” ...

FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/mars-rover-1st-close-up-photo-496df4eb54125512623959a7abe8e5c5
 
Here's another photo of a type I don't recall us ever seeing before - an image of a Mars rover descending toward its landing zone with its parachute. The image was captured via a tricky time-critical maneuver by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

perseverance_descent.jpg

HiRISE Captured Perseverance During Descent to Mars

The descent stage holding NASA’s Perseverance rover can be seen falling through the Martian atmosphere, its parachute trailing behind, in this image taken on Feb. 18, 2021, by the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The ancient river delta, which is the target of the Perseverance mission, can be seen entering Jezero Crater from the left.

HiRISE was approximately 435 miles (700 kilometers) from Perseverance and traveling at about 6750 mile per hour (3 kilometers per second) at the time the image was taken. The extreme distance and high speeds of the two spacecraft were challenging conditions that required precise timing and for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to both pitch upward and roll hard to the left so that Perseverance was viewable by HiRISE at just the right moment. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/hirise-captured-perseverance-during-descent-to-mars
 
Here's another photo of a type I don't recall us ever seeing before - an image of a Mars rover descending toward its landing zone with its parachute. The image was captured via a tricky time-critical maneuver by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
iirc we have gotten a photo of a descent before, but can't find the picture.

edit: it was Curiosity in 2012, and the BBC says they photographed Phoenix in 2008 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19150849

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Hey! This is an American mission. It's "color", not "colour". :atom:
However, when the equations that would be used to process and translate tracking data into flight instructions were encoded onto punch cards, one critical symbol was left out causing a major fatal flaw in the software of the guidance system. Essentially, it was the lack of that over bar or over line, which is often confused in ensuing years with a hyphen, that caused the guidance computer to incorrectly compensate for some otherwise normal movement in the spacecraft. As the New York Times reported days after the launch: “The hyphen symbol, called a 'bar,' if officially fed into the computer on its punched card instructions, tells the machine not to worry about this normal veering movement. The spacecraft landed up manoeuvring in a way that it shouldn’t have and which put it on a path to crash, possibly into inhabited areas. For safety purposes, then, 293 seconds into the mission it was destroyed on command”.

Yours,
A Pedant.
 
Do you mean it's a shame we didn't get to see something like this:
Yes - it's an actual photo of the rover being lowered onto the surface by the sky crane module ...

I saw that today - it's amazing isn't it? There will be some video footage of the decent released too according to an article I read. I can't wait to see it. Again, it's a shame we didn't get a live feed but better late than never.
 
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