Watch the Perseverance Rover Land on Mars in This Newly Released NASA Video

February 23, 2021 at 02:32AM

When the Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on Feb. 18, NASA controllers had only the data-stream coming back from the spacecraft to confirm that the hair-raising descent was going as planned. It was only when they got the “weight on wheels” signal—the confirmation that the rover was on the ground and supporting itself—that they knew the landing was a success.

Now, just four days later, NASA has released footage of the landing captured by multiple cameras on both the spacecraft itself and the “sky crane” descent stage that lowered the rover the last 21 meters (70 ft.) to the ground. A spectacular landing now seems all the more so.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

They’re Healthy. They’re Sustainable. So Why Don’t Humans Eat More Bugs?

Image
February 26, 2021 at 08:01PM Sylvain Hugel is one of the world’s foremost experts on crickets of the Indian Ocean Islands . So when he received an email from a fellow entomologist in March 2017 asking for help identifying a species in Madagascar that could be farmed for humans to consume, he thought it was a joke. “I’m working to protect those insects, not eat them,” the French academic responded tartly. But the emails from Brian Fisher , an ant specialist at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, kept coming. Fisher had been doing fieldwork in Madagascar when he realized that the forests where both he and Hugel conducted much of their research were disappearing. Nearly 80% of Madagascar’s forest coverage has been destroyed since the 1950s, and 1-2% of what remains is cut down each year as farmers clear more trees to make room for livestock. The only way to prevent this, Fisher told Hugel in his emails, was to give locals an alternative source of protein.
Read more

A Climate Change-Induced Landslide Is Wreaking Havoc on Denali National Park

Image
September 07, 2021 at 07:24PM For decades, the rangers at Denali National Park in Alaska were easily winning their battle against a slow-moving landslide underneath the park’s only road. Now, due in part to the effects of climate change, they are losing very badly. This summer, the National Parks Service has been frantically dropping 100 dump-trucks-worth of gravel every week on the top of the Pretty Rocks Landslide in an effort to keep up with its accelerating pace, which is the result of rapidly thawing permafrost in the country’s fastest-warming state . Two weeks ago, as the landslide hit unprecedented speed, causing the ground around it to undulate with each passing truck, the team conceded defeat and closed the back half of the park weeks earlier than anticipated. The closure is bad news both in the short term—with hundreds of camping and hotel reservations cancelled on a local economy that depends on tourism—and a scary omen for an entire state that rests on similarly t
Read more