NASA is sharing photos of debris from landing gear that helped the Perseverance rover land on Mars.
The Perseverance rover landed on Mars’ surface on Feb. 18, 2021, and the photos were taken on April 19, 2022.
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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter captured the photos, which provide more detail about Perseverance’s landing.
“Perseverance had the best-documented Mars landing in history, with cameras showing everything from parachute inflation to touchdown,” said former Perseverance systems engineer Ian Clark.
Clark now works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the Mars Sample Return ascent phase lead and said in a press release that the photos from Ingenuity offer a different vantage point.
“If they either reinforce that our systems worked as we think they worked or provide even one dataset of engineering information we can use for Mars Sample Return planning, it will be amazing. And if not, the pictures are still phenomenal and inspiring,” Clark said.
The images taken by Ingenuity show the upright backshell and the debris field that resulted from Perseverance’s landing gear hitting the surface of the red planet.
“Many of the 80 high-strength suspension lines connecting the backshell to the parachute are visible and also appear intact,” the press release states. “Spread out and covered in dust, only about a third of the orange-and-white parachute can be seen, but the canopy shows no signs of damage from the supersonic airflow during inflation.”
Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, is also known as the red planet because of iron minerals in the soil that rust, or oxidize, giving the soil and atmosphere a red hue, according to NASA.