‘My first look at my forever home’: Perseverance sends home its first pictures of planet Mars

Byhindustantimes.com | Edited by Shankhyaneel Sarkar, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

Feb 19, 2021 08:40 AM IST

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This is Nasa’s most advanced rover which the US space agency has sent to another world.

Nasa's Mars rover, Perseverance, landed on the Jezero crater on the Red Planet on Friday in a risky mission aimed at finding whether there were life forms that ever existed on the planet. Several scientists of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were exuberant about Perseverance’s safe landing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California after operations lead Swati Mohan confirmed the landing of the rover in the Jezero crater.

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image of the area in back of it using its onboard Rear Right Hazard Avoidance Camera.(NASA/JPL-Caltech)

“Touchdown confirmed,” Perseverance’s official Twitter handle said in its tweet confirming the safe landing. Following its landing, the rover sent its first rocky images from Mars.

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image of the area in front of it using its onboard Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera A. This image was acquired on Feb. 18, 2021 (Sol 0) at the local mean solar time of 20:58:24.(NASA/JPL-Caltech)

“Hello, world. My first look at my forever home,” Nasa's Perseverance Mars Rover tweeted.

This is Nasa’s most advanced rover which the US space agency has sent to another world. “This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally – when we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks,” the space agency’s administrator Steve Jurczyk said in a statement.

“The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nation’s spirit of persevering even in the most challenging of situations, inspiring, and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet,” Jurczyk added.

The Perseverance rover, which is a robotic geologist and astrobiologist, will undergo several weeks of testing before it begins its two-year mission of Mars’ Jezero Crater, the statement further added.

Perseverance is scheduled to carry tests and investigate the rock and sediment of Jezero’s ancient lakebed and Jezero’s river delta to analyse the geology of the region and determine the past climate. The other primary objective of Perseverance is also to find signs of ancient microbial life in Earth’s closest neighbour.