NASA Mars Rover Perseverance is giving a never-before-seen view of the Red Planet just days after its successful landing.
With 19 cameras on board, Perseverance provides a 360-degree panorama view of Mars, visible in a new high definition image of the rover’s landing site.
Check out the view in the video above from NBC News, or take a longer look in NASA’s Twitter video touring the Mars landing site below.
LIVE🔴
— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 25, 2021
Take a close look at my new home. Members of my team are giving you a tour around the high-def 360-degree panorama I sent back. They're zooming in on the details of the Martian terrain I'm in and are answering your questions live. #CountdownToMarshttps://t.co/9tpv4Vl4lV
The Mars rover successfully landed on Feb. 18 near an ancient river delta in the Jezero Crater to search for signs of ancient microscopic life. When zooming in on Perseverance’s panorama, the front edge of the Jezero Crater is visible just a mile and a half away from the rover, in addition to rocks scorched by the rockets that delivered the rover to Mars.
As NASA’s biggest and most advanced rover, Perseverance successfully tackled NASA’s smallest and trickiest target by landing in the Jezero Crater, which is a 5-by-4-mile strip on an ancient river delta full of pits, cliffs and rocks. Scientists believe that if life ever flourished on Mars, it would have happened 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, when water still flowed on the planet.
Perseverance is now the ninth spacecraft to successfully land on Mars since the 1970s, and each of those spacecrafts have been from the U.S.
Over the next two years, the rover will collect rock samples containing possible signs of bygone microscopic life, which will eventually be retrieved by another rover and brought back to Earth by another rocket ship.