Space3 min(s) read
Published 15:25 19 Feb 2021 GMT
NASA has released a number of incredible pictures from the surface of the planet Mars taken with its new Perseverance rover.
According to BBC News, the American space agency successfully landed the Perseverance rover in a deep crater near the planet's equator, named Jezero, which is thought to have once been a large lake.
This means that it might be a likely place for the rover to collect soil and mineral samples that could teach us more about the possibility of life on the red planet.
The BBC reports that the robot landed approximately two kilometers to the southeast of the delta feature which NASA plans to investigate
The rover has now taken two grainy, black-and-white pictures of the surface of the fourth planet from the sun, captured by low-resolution engineering cameras.
Although a thick layer of dust from the landing has covered the still-attached translucent lens covers it's was possible to see a flat surface both from the front and from behind the rover.
The space agency later uploaded the images to the official Twitter account of the Perseverance rover, sharing them with the machine's 1.5 million followers.
The first image, showing the view from the rover's front, was captioned: "Hello, world. My first look at my forever home. #CountdownToMars. [sic]"
Meanwhile, the second picture taken from the rover's back was captioned: "And another look behind me. Welcome to Jezero Crater. #CountDownToMars [sic]"
Commenting on the successful landing in an official statement, Ken Williford, Deputy Project Scientist for the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stated:
"We expect the best places to look for biosignatures would be in Jezero's lakebed or in shoreline sediments that could be encrusted with carbonate minerals, which are especially good at preserving certain kinds of fossilized life on Earth.
"But as we search for evidence of ancient microbes on an ancient alien world, it's important to keep an open mind."
Furthermore, Mars Sample Return program manager Bobby Braun added:
"We have strong evidence that Jezero Crater once had the ingredients for life.
"Even if we conclude after returned sample analysis that the lake was uninhabited, we will have learned something important about the reach of life in the cosmos.
"Whether or not Mars was ever a living planet, it’s essential to understand how rocky planets like ours form and evolve."
According to the above statement, Perseverance uses state-of-the-art Mastcam-Z to inspect scientifically interesting targets.
Misson control can then order the Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument to fire a laser at its target, which generates a small plasma cloud, which can be analyzed to determine the chemical composition of the sample.
Meanwhile, the PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) will deploy a powerful X-ray beam to search for potential chemical fingerprints.
In addition to this, the SHERLOC (the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) scries for the organic molecules and minerals which might have formed in water-rich environments.
