See Mars Like Never Before! NASA's Perseverance Rover Sends New Video and Images of the Red Planet

[Music] [Music] welcome to nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in southern california days ago nasa's most sophisticated and capable rover to date landed on mars the perseverance rover today we'll see mars like never before with new photos and videos our panel today will help us understand how perseverance captured what it's like to land on mars and what the landing site looks like i'm your host raquel villanueva and joining us is matt wallace perseverance deputy project manager dave grull perseverance entry descent and landing camera suite lead al chen perseverance entry descent and landing lead justin mackey perseverance imaging scientist and instrument operations team chief jessica samuels perseverance surface mission manager ken williford perseverance deputy project scientist and to tell us what this all means for nasa and exploration thomas zurbukin associate administrator for nasa's science mission directorate we will take questions during this briefing if you're a member of the media on the phone lines press star one to be put in the queue if you're on social media use the hashtag countdown to mars now to get us started is jpl director mike watkins now i will step aside for him to give his opening remarks thank you welcome back to jpl we have a jam-packed press conference today and i was just looking at uh at the team here i think we're trying to add it up maybe a hundred years of combined experience with mars rovers on the panel today now we have been working very hard since we landed the surface team has been getting the rover set up for the surface mission they've been working mars time over the weekend making fantastic progress and you'll hear about that today you'll also see some brand new images and videos that we acquired over the weekend are downlinked over the weekend and these are really fantastic images of the surface of mars and the rest of the descent imagery that um that we got a preview of on friday these images have always been part of the history of jpl uh you know we have taken everyone along with us on our journeys across the solar system through the rings of saturn looking back at the pale blue dot and incredible panoramas on the surface of mars this is the first time we've been able to actually capture an event like the landing of a spacecraft on mars and these are pretty cool videos and we will learn something by looking at the performance of the vehicle in these videos but a lot of it is also to bring you along uh on our journey our touchdown to mars and of course our surface mission as well and uh these are really amazing videos uh we all binge watched them over the weekend if you can call a one minute video binge watching but uh but we watched it many many times and it's really fantastic and just to show you how far we've come in history of jpl i want to show one image this is from mariner 4 in 1965. so this was actually the first data first images sent back from mars by mariner 4 and that was hand colored by the engineers according to a code kind of like a paint by numbers uh uh painting and that's there it is the first color color image hand painted and so when you see these videos later uh i think dave grulin and justin mackey will be overjoyed that they didn't have to hand color each one of these one of these images so my hat is off it's a great press conference today my head is off to the team you know for getting the rover to where we are and these fantastic images down and to learn more about that team let me introduce matt wallace thanks very much mike and thanks for the nice words about the uh the the team i'll try to be brief because i want to get to this video and i know you do too um i just want to give you a little bit of background on how this whole thing started my daughter is a gymnast she's been a gymnast since she was a little kid and when she was about i guess 11 years old and the project was still in formulation she asked me for one of those little sports cameras and being the indulgent parent i am i i got her the sports camera and she put it in the harness that it came with and she put the harness on and she did a backflip and uh i i don't know about you but uh i cannot do a backflip but when she showed me the video and i watched that camera pan up to the ceiling and then the room go upside down and then somehow write itself as she landed on her feet you know i felt for a moment that i had a glimpse into what it would be like if i could do a back flip and that was the moment that inspired a phone call to my friend dave gruel over here and that's what led to this system this entry descent and landing camera system we call them the edl cams that you're about to see the product of here just just in a moment now i don't know about you but uh it is unlikely at this point my career that i will pilot a spacecraft down to the surface of mars but when you see this imagery uh i think you will feel like you are getting a glimpse into what it would be like to land successfully in jezreel cradle crater with perseverance and so without any further delay i'm going to turn it over to dave he'll describe the system and we'll get to the video thanks great thanks matt um the idea of adding a ruggedized commercial off shelf hardware onto a flagship spacecraft to do a nice to have function proved to be quite an interesting challenge that matt handed over to us along the way we encountered one maybe two people who were a little bit skeptical of what we were trying to do but thankfully we had the full support of project leadership um all the individuals directly supporting the 2020 mission were super excited to help and in the end we were able to actually make it happen our edl cam team were guided by uh two two requirements if you will um the first one was that the entry descent and landing system camera system must do no harm to the flight vehicle and that's especially important during edl this was our one critical requirement and as you all saw last thursday that requirement was met the second item is not so much as of a requirement as it is a mantra if you will we get what we get and we don't get upset um we wanted our edl cam system to get onto the vehicle and return amazing imagery of the vehicle landing in uh jezreel crater on mars like every other element on the mars 2020 spacecraft individuals worked really hard and went above and beyond to make sure that their piece of the spacecraft did what it was supposed to do and would be successful but in the end we knew that our entry descent and landing camera system um the mission could still be 100 successful if our camera system didn't work and if we could even get just one image or one piece of information back during edl that we shouldn't get upset and we should be excited so as you probably realize after last friday's press conference the ddocam system successfully captured some amazing imagery of the vehicle's descent and landing on the surface of mars we collected a little over 30 gigabytes of information and over 23 000 images of the vehicle descending down to the surface of mars as a quick introduction if i could have the first graphic a reminder for some of you exactly what are the sensors that we included in the entry descent and landing camera system uh there are three cameras that are located on the top of the vehicle on the back shell uh those cameras actually capture a high rate uh 75 frames a second imagery of the parachute inflating in the martian atmosphere now one of the cameras stopped operating coincident with the mortar fire when the parachute was deployed and that's to be expected it is a very high dynamic environment but luckily the other two cameras continue to operate as expected and captured some amazing footage of the parachutes inflating in that martian atmosphere we put one camera on the bottom of the descent stage that camera looked down on the rover as we lowered the rover on the bridles the mobility system latched into position and then the vehicle touched down onto the surface of mars we also installed two cameras onto the rover one on the top of the vehicle looking up on the descent stage so the rover could actually see the descent stage lower it down to the surface and then ideally fly off into the distance after it had delivered perseverance safely under the surface and then we also put a camera on the bottom of the rover which actually looked down on the surface of mars once the heat shield was dropped away and that camera continued to capture imagery until the vehicle touched down on the surface of mars and then we also put a microphone on the port side of the rover now unfortunately i do have to say that we did not collect any audio during edl but uh please stay tuned a little bit later in this press conference because we do have some exciting information about the edl cam microphone so now the reaction to the edlcam videos has been absolutely amazing around jpl and we are super excited to actually share with all of you video imagery of perseverance landing on the surface of mars please roll the video starting the straighten up and fly right maneuver where the spacecraft will jettison the entry balance masses in preparation for parachute deploy and to roll over to give the radar a better look at the ground applicator indicate shoot deploy the navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed and we are seeing significant deceleration in the velocity our current velocity is 450 meters per second at an altitude of about 12 kilometers from the surface of mars heat shield set pressure vans have now slowed to subsonic speeds and the heat shield has been separated this allows both the radar and the cameras to get their first look at the surface current velocity is 145 meters per second and an altitude of about 10 km nine and a half kilometers above the surface now filter converge velocity solution 3.3 meters per second altitude 7.4 kilometers now has radar lock on the ground current velocity is about 100 meters per second kilometers of the surface perseverance is continuing to descend on the parachute we are coming up on the initialization of terrain relative navigation and subsequently the priming of the landing engines our current velocity is about 90 meters per second at an altitude of 4.2 kilometers lvs valid we have confirmation that the lander vision system has produced a valid solution and part of training relative navigation priming pba is nominal we have timing of the landing engines backshell current velocity is 83 meters per second at about 2.6 kilometers from the surface to mars we have confirmation that the back shell has separated we are currently performing the divert maneuver current velocity is about 75 meters per second at an altitude of about a kilometer off the surface of mars here in safety bravo we have completed our terrain relative navigation current speed is about 30 meters per second altitude of about 300 meters off the surface of mars we have started our constant velocity accordion which means we are conducting the sky crane about to conduct the flight crane maneuver skytrain maneuver has started about 20 meters off the surface we're getting signals from mro tango delta touchdown confirmed perseverance the surface of mars ready to begin seeking the stands of past life it gives me goose bumps every time i i see it just just amazing i hope everybody kept their uh hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times while i was in motion um so i do need to say uh i wouldn't be sitting at this podium and you wouldn't have all seen that uh amazing uh imagery without a a lot of support from an amazing team and both those who worked directly on the edl cam task as well as those who supported us across the project i thank you for everything you've done to get us here today uh just an amazing amazing accomplishment so um i'm gonna turn over to to al al is gonna be our color analyst doesn't have an illustrator but he's gonna actually walk through some of those videos in even more detail and actually show you some just incredible things that you can actually see once you look at those videos over and over i'm not sure the color commentator is supposed to have as many chills as i do right now and every time i see these videos but i want to add my thanks to the uh to eel camera team i mean these videos and these images are the stuff of our dreams it's been the what we've been dreaming about for years so thank you so much um let's see uh as uh as dave mentioned we'll try to walk through what we see a little bit we won't take that much time because uh we could spend literally all day looking at these videos and some of us have spent all the weekend looking at these videos but we'll just try to show you some highlights of what we've been seeing and invite you all to continue to look for more things as we kind of see new things every time we look at these videos so let's start with the parachute upload camera and let me give you a quick warning to not blink because things go really fast here you can see that you can get a sense really of how violent that parachute deploy and inflation are the parachute pack it's the parachute is packed so densely that the pack is basically the same density as oak and it's about 150 pounds it gets launched out of the spacecraft with a mortar which is basically a cannon with a muzzle velocity of around 100 miles an hour and the spacecraft itself was going about a thousand miles an hour at this point going about 1.75 times the speed of sound so just in case you blink let's show you that one more time you kind of see that in uh in high speed and then or real time and then we'll slow it down and take a look at the details okay so let's try to walk through this a bit slower this time at about quarter speed and we'll pause at times to point out things we see so let's start that rolling okay here you can see the pack getting pushed out of there you can kind of see the pack right in the middle as it's being pushed uh and the uh the parachute lid which is right on top of it it's kind of that circle to the left of the pack was on top of the pack and it was there to protect the parachute during entry it's got some thermal protection system material on it to keep the parachute nice and cool and protected and the pack is used to push that lid right off the vehicle given that cannon force you can also see some of the other things that have popped off of that lid which is kind of expected given how violent this uh this launch really is so let's move on from here so we keep going out here you can see the pack reach what we call line stretch so that's as far as it's going to go it's where the parachute is going to start inflating that's about 150 feet behind the spacecraft and it got there in just under one second so this pack is really moving that's pretty much as the parachute starts to come out you can see the pack is rotated about 90 degrees that's pretty common we've seen that in some of our testing here on earth at high altitude as well so let's keep going and take a look at the inflation science really looks textbook it's nice and symmetric the parachute opens in only about seven tenths of a second again really fast there's no evidence of tangling of the lines which is great that's uh there's about two miles of lines in the parachute system so the fact that we don't see any evidence of tangling or any kind of other misbehavior is great news and i'm sure we'll be studying this video for many many years and picking it apart frame by frame and of course we have a second camera on board as well that recorded this this launch and inflation of the parachute um you might notice the pattern that's on the the parachute here the sync patterns are useful in helping us determine the clocking or orientation of the parachute also the contrasting sections can be useful in tracking different positions of the parachute different portions of the parachute as it inflates so it's especially useful when we have multiple cameras as we do here and are trying to track features in the parachute inflating in addition to enabling incredible science we hope our efforts and our engineering can inspire others sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find for that purpose so we invite you all to give it a shot and show your work let's move on to the rover download camera and take a look at that in a little bit more detail so if we start that up you can see the heat shield falling away very nicely and symmetrically pausing here we can take a look at what we see on the on the heat shield first we see the medley components on the heat shield you can see the electronics box and the gold wires that lead to all the various to all the various sensors that measured the aerodynamics and heating during entry during the entry portion of flight we can also see some white flecks in different places both on the heat shield and free flying which are likely frost that accumulated on the heat shield that heat shield is really really cold during cruise so it's not at all unexpected to see some of that frost appearing on the heat shield on the inside you can also see something we didn't expect to see if you kind of look at the four o'clock position on the heat shield or so towards the middle somewhere somewhere between the middle and the edge one of the springs that helped push the heat shield off seems to come loose uh it doesn't you know it's not much of a big deal but it's definitely not not what we expected if you look at the other eight uh springs they actually are where they're supposed to be all around the edge of the heat shield there's no danger to the spacecraft here but it's something we expect and i think we wouldn't see if we didn't have the camera system to show us what was going on so let's keep rolling here we can see that the heat shield basically stays in the same orientation as it flies away from us they'll come back into view in a little bit but this is uh this is great this is kind of what we expected in terms of the aerodynamics of that heat shield it doesn't tumble or do something weird uh that was unexpected in flight so that's very useful to have this video to show us that so in interest time let's skip ahead uh to about 15 seconds before backshell separation so starting this video here you can see that the spacecraft is rocking back and forth while hanging under the parachute this this rocket is less than it was earlier in flight but uh pretty much what we expect there that white flash was back shell separation and you can see us throttle up and begin our divert maneuver you see the vehicle is turned over so we're actually beginning to fly east and that's why you can see the the delta over there as it as it maneuvers eastward to the eventual landing site it actually passes over the field of view will pass over the landing site and then kind of overshoot it a little bit because it's got to stop that horizontal divert that we did you can see everything's nice and smooth now that the engines are under control that on-sheet parachute rocking is gone so here we are slowing down and stopping and we're coming straight down on our eventual landing site here you can see that as we as we're really going to slow down here you can see the engines as we get lower throttle up there and uh and stop us here and you can see it beginning to push all that dust around on the ground on the two sides that shaking there is the rover deploying and the mobility during skycrane and uh here we are coming down and that that rocking motion of the of the rover we'll see in other videos but that settles down right before we hit the ground in a nice safe flat spot there doesn't appear to be too much of concern that's right below us so that was the rover's view looking down let's take a look at the descent stage view looking down as well during that skycrane portion of flight uh so here we go the rover begins to drop away from the descent stage and that's the first the first part of the mobility deployed you can kind of see here right before we pause that the mobility kind of shook a little bit in that in that first deployment uh here you can see the uh the bridles that are hanging down from the top of the picture those are what's supporting the weight of the rover below the descent stage and if you look down toward the left the bottom part of the image and toward the left you can see that gold umbilical that's uh what's transferring all the information between the rover and the descent stage including this video uh this picture is coming down from the camera up on the descent stage down to the rover through that cord uh in addition to other information that's going back and forth so as we uh keep going here you can see the bogey that's on both sides of the mobility back you see those wheels the back two wheels on either side swing down that caused a little bit of rocking of the rover as expected but you can kind of see that kind of settles out a little bit uh right as we enter that that uh that plume and dust cloud as we get down and touch down and the video ends a touchdown of course because the camera that's taking this video is about to leave this area in a hurry on that descent stage after we uh we cut it loose from the rover um so now let's take a look at the rover upload camera so now staring up at the uh at the descent stage from the rover so here we go we got a really close up look at the descent stage and we can start rolling that you can see the descent stage as the rover begins to fall away from it and see the effect of that rover wobble from the mobility deploy so pausing here the first thing that most people will probably notice is that there's no no plumes or no visible smoke or anything else coming out of the rockets at the corner of the descent that's expected hydrazine doesn't really isn't isn't a combustion uh reaction when we when we burn it the exhaust products are nitrogen and hydrogen which are clear so we expect the the plumes to be clear that's what we see in tests here on earth as well uh so i can promise you those engines are on though uh one thing you can see in this in the earth testing we do is that the chambers the thrust chambers of those engines get kind of hot and glow pink and you can kind of see that in here especially if you look at the the the engine at the very top right of this image if you look closely right above the uh the engine bell there on the truss chamber you can see little streaks of pink on there and that's what's happening as the engines have been on for a long time they get really hot um and that heat shows up there in those pink stripes that we see so take a look at that closely when you get a chance to uh to look at the image in some detail as with the previous videos you can see the bridles that are supporting the weight of the rover there at the bottom now of this image and that umbilical again transferring uh transferring data back and forth between the stage and the rover um so let's keep going a little bit more uh you'll see the image begin to wobble a little bit here i can promise not the descent stage wobbling it's actually that rover tipping back and forth a little bit as we saw as the mobility deploys both the first initial mobility deploy and then the the the bogeys deploying as we near touchdown let's slow it down a bit and proceed in slow-mo here um so now we're watching about quarter speed things are getting pretty dusty here as we get down down toward the bottom uh take a look here at the bottom left of this picture um you'll see actually the instance that we cut the descent stage away and you'll see the models begin to get retracted up toward that descent stage as they're pulled up and this is as planned see as they got yanked up there right before and then we'll see the descent stage begin to turn and ascend and head out uh toward the northwest with the umbilical dangling behind it since the rover was pointed almost directly to southeast the descent stage chose to to go toward the back that's also to make sure of course that the the engines don't plume the rover that we don't damage the rover with those that engine thrust so we sent that descent stage off to the northwest which uh jessica will show you about in a little bit um so i can and have watched those videos for hours and keep seeing new stuff every time so i invite you all to do that too so now i'll turn it over to justin who will talk to you a little bit about the images we've been taking on the ground all right thank you al i'm justin mackey i'm the mars 2020 perseverance imaging scientist here and i develop imaging systems at jpl and uh when when dave asked me to help out with the edl cam development about uh six years ago we were i was really excited about it and it would be challenging and interesting and even possibly spectacular but i had no idea that it would be this amazing and we are so happy and proud and i just want to thank dave and matt for just giving us the leadership and giving us the chance to do this um like matt and jennifer and rick and others on the project i've i've actually worked on all five of the nasa revolutions and as part of my job i review images from mars like every day that's what i do and when i saw these images come down i have to say i was truly amazed i know it's been a tough year for everybody and we're hoping that maybe these images will you know help brighten people's day you know your smartphones and make them your your screen backgrounds and things i'm just really happy that it all worked out so so now we're on mars and i'm going to talk a little bit about what we've been doing over the weekend over the weekend we deployed the rsm if you go to the first picture there's a picture of the remote sensing mask the rsm which is that mast on the rover and you can see the navigation cameras up there the left and right navigation cameras or nav cams as we call them this is another new imaging system that we've developed here specifically for the 2020 mission these cameras represent a pretty significant advancement over previous imaging systems that we've flown these are 20 megapixel color cameras with very high resolution and wide angle lenses that we use to basically map out the surface as the river drives and then we use these images to do planning and things and so we um the first thing we did after we deployed the mass is we started imaging the surface so the next slide shows one of our first images from the cameras this image is actually in low resolution mode so it's one quarter of the full resolution of the of the camera so it's been it's been shrunk down but you can see right there the vista that we're seeing this is uh the rover obviously on mars and you can see some of the material that landed on the deck but everything looks in good shape and so we're using these images to inspect not only the vehicle but the surface around us the next slide shows the view down towards the surface you can see the wheels there this is the same surface you just saw in the edl cam videos you can see some of the scouring that the rocket plumes did for us clean it off make it nice and clean so we can take pictures of it and dust it off for us the next slide shows a view looking out towards the south um and this just an amazing scene here uh this is it this is mars where we're here in our place that we're going to be exploring over the next months and coming years and it's just really exciting to see um you know these scenes look familiar to us you know they look earth-like in a sense you know you see them the mountains back there and the rocks and things it just really is the surface of an alien world and we just arrived you can also see some more scouring there over on the right the next image looks over towards the west you can see the delta out there in the horizon and again more scouring from the rocket plumes and then we take all of these images and we uh stitch them together into panoramas and so that next the the next frame shows the full panorama from the nav cam uh stitched together we're still working out the calibration of things so this is uh you know approximate color but it just gives you a feel for the vista here that we we're our new environment that we're going to explore uh and we're hoping uh everyone will join us uh in um seeing these images we're uh today we're going to be releasing a whole slew of raw images it's been a fire hose of data basically we have thousands of images already from the edl cameras nav cams uh you've seen the haz cams and so we will be putting those uh out on the website today uh for people to download and uh process yourself or just look at the great picture find your favorite picture and uh make it make it your screen background and then the last image that i just wanted to point out is the first image one of the first images from the mastcam z camera this is another next generation imaging system on the rover jim bell is the the pi i'm the deputy pi for this working with our industry partners ms cubed down in san diego this is just a fantastic imaging system this is a preview of things to come this system has a zoom lens on it that's what the z stands for uh and we're going to get incredibly high resolution photos from this imaging system i just wanted to point out a few things in this picture on the far right you can see those cables where they had been cut uh in the video that you just saw so there's kind of a close-up of that and then just in the middle to the left of that that black instrument that's uh the rover upload camera that's the camera that actually took the video of the sky crane as as we were coming down and then in the bottom of the frame is the mass cam z calibration target set there's two of them there's the circular one with the the shadow post and then the color chips down the bottom there's another cal target in the back that's the super cam instrument with our partners from los alamos and in france we're going to be commissioning super cam over the next few days and then finally just as a teaser i'll point out that there is a little antenna there to the right on that uh box on the center right that is the helicopter antenna that's a helicopter base station location and a preview of things to come we're excited about that as well so with that i'm going to turn it over to jessica to talk about the latest status all right thank you justin i know you can uh test first hand to being in the control room and the excitement that everybody has been experiencing seeing all these images from the surface and as they come down you know we're immediately sharing them and everybody clapping and smiles all around great camera suite so i am happy to report that uh perseverance is healthy and uh continuing with activities as we have been uh planning them over the first few saws on the surface to date uh which is really only just you know three solves of activities and one more and coming up later this afternoon we've commanded five thou we've executed five thousand commands so lots of uh instructions to the vehicle for um for her to perform and uh having everything come back exactly how we've been wanting it to with respect to our health checkouts and our instrument at checkout so that's been things have been going well a couple of key highlights so we have fired and replete and released our launch lock restraints to allow our mechanisms to be deployed we saw the remote sensing mast but one of those also being the high gain antenna now this is important for the high gain antenna to be deployed because it increases our uplink rate to the rover and so it will allow us to send a higher volume of instructions to perseverance and allow her to perform more involved activities over the days to come additionally with respect to our communication uh we have established a strong communication link with all of our related orbiters and our partners the mars reconnaissance orbiter the maven orbiter trace gas observer the tgo and odyssey spacecraft and so we thank those teams and are happy to be able to use those assets to relay all of the information that we all these beautiful images that we are looking at today the remote sensing mash remote sensing mast motion checks were nominal and as expected and all of our instruments have gone through their initial checkouts and are happy to report that they are all performing nominally and as expected now when i say nominal it really means fantastic because we can't wait to continue to use this payload suite our backup computer was turned on yesterday and that was in preparation for our upcoming flight software uh transition which we will be performing over the next few days and the ingenuity helicopter has also been checked out we have performed a battery charging event which we will continue to perform over the weeks to come in preparation for that aspect of the mission but looking ahead we are excited to be par to be on our surface flight software this is a much more uh surface capable a lot more capabilities for the surface mission as part of this flight software load it will take us a few days uh to transition but once we're on that load it will allow us to do further in-depth checkouts of the instrument as well as deploy the robotic arm and exercise some of the turret items that you see in this image so you can see that we have our coring drill in the center our pixel and sherlock instruments mounted to the side and that black tank is to support the gut the gas dust removal tool which will uh remove uh dust from the surfaces that we will be inspecting later so uh coming up here the uh the wheels uh if you noticed in the image now are off to the side we will be performing a wiggle we'll straighten those up we'll do a short drive uh and as i mentioned deploy the robotic arm and then continue with further in-depth checkouts so we are very excited to be happily on the surface and and exercising our system and looking for what's ahead so going back to our partnership with the larger mars um spacecraft and science teams and community we're really excited that the mro spacecraft mars reconnaissance orbiter and the highrise team was able to find our hardware on the surface of mars so if you see in this image if the next pop-up you can see that we have the descent stage the parachute and the heat shield all here um in this image with a few stats here the descent stage is about 700 meters away from where perseverance is on the surface parachute is about 1.2 kilometers and the heat shield about 1.5 kilometers and so it's a very exciting that we can see all these different components now that we've landed on the surface and as a special treat uh the high-rise image was able to actually acquire um the entry descent landing event from their perspective and we can never have enough images of this activity and so this is a fantastic view uh but i'm going to send it back to dave here he uh as part of this suite we have one more surprise or one more uh gift i'll say um that uh that we've been able to receive from this package over here dave thanks jessica so i think we probably have overloaded your visual sense for a little bit but we're gonna do something a little bit different and i'm gonna have some fun here for a second too so i'm gonna get rid of this and i'm going to talk to you now with this this is the microphone that was part of the edl camera system when the edl cam system was first envisioned it was set up as just a bunch of cameras to capture some amazing imagery on the surface of mars and about a year or so after it was first conceived i got a phone call another call from matt after talking to headquarters asked the question could we possibly put a microphone as part of our edl camera system so we worked with the team we took a look and uh sure enough it was something that we could do and so we started off that detailed design and uh identifying a microphone that would work for us and uh getting it onto the vehicle about a year after this first started i'm giving a tour at jpl and i happened to mention to the group that i was giving the tour to that the decision had come down and we're working to actually include a microphone onto onto the vehicle and after the tour was done a gal came up to me and she said some things to me that i won't forget anytime soon she said i'm super excited that you guys are going to try to put a microphone onto the rover and get it to the surface of mars and and i was very appreciative and i asked her afterwards i said i'm curious why is it that this relates to you so much and her response was that her sister was visually impaired she was not able to see these images that that we saw earlier or that we sent down in the past and while she tries to describe them to her she felt that she just can't quite capture that same sense of amazement that she gets when she gets in visually and that by actually getting a microphone at the surface of mars the hope was that she'd be able to experience things on mars the same way that uh that she was when she actually looked at them and that stuck with me we continued to work super hard to make sure that this microphone would work and that's part of the reason we were disappointed why it didn't work when we actually went and did our entry descent landing sequence um i wish i had actually captured that individual's name i would love to reach out to her now and say we've done it i hope your sister is enjoying it because what i'm going to show you in a second or what i'm going to you're going to hear in a second is actually the first sounds being recorded from the surface of mars so there are two microphones on the perseverance vehicle there's this microphone here part of the entry descent and landing system and there's a second microphone that's on the supercam instrument and we're we're counting on both of these instruments recording some absolutely amazing uh sounds from the surface of mars so with that um i invite you now to if you would like to close your eyes and just imagine yourself sitting on the surface of mars and listening to to the surroundings if i could have the first one please so that gentle whirl that happens in the background that is a noise made by the rover but yes what you did here 10 seconds in was an actual wind gust on the surface of mars picked up by the microphone sent back to us here on earth the nexus indicates that was around a five meter per second type of wind gust so we have actually we can sit here now and actually tell you that we have recorded sound from the surface of mars so we have a second one which basically further reduces the noise of the rover so you can just hear uh what the wind would sound like on mars and once again i invite you to sit back and have a listen to what it would sound like to be on mars that's just it's cool it's really neat overwhelming if you will um i can't remember what i was going to go and say next um so looking forward to doing some amazing things with the microphones going forward we need to work with the ops team there's some great science that they're they're looking to do we're hopeful that we continue to use these microphones both the super cam microphone and the edl cam microphone to capture sounds perhaps the rocks interacting with the surface supercam is going to use theirs to get some great data of them zapping rocks so as you've heard and we'll continue here we're just beginning to do amazing things on the surface of mars and now ken is going to talk to you a little bit about the science that we've done to date and what they're looking forward to doing as we continue to move forward thanks dave and i'll start by just taking this opportunity to say to matt dave al and everybody else on this fantastic team thank you for the ride of a lifetime that is just incredible what we've seen today and and what i'm sure we'll we'll continue to see as the mission unfolds so with all the focus on these uh spectacular videos and audio uh we wanted to make sure to remind you that there is plenty of science going on already with hundreds of team members poring over every new image so if we can get the first of those uh images as you'll see in this navcam frame we start with what may seem like very basic observations light rocks dark rocks holy rocks that's holy with an e we use these very generic terms at this early stage until we have more data that allow us to test our hypotheses and make more confident interpretations follow along with the mission and you'll see the theme as we get closer our view of mars continues to resolve and a coherent story emerges next image please finally i just want to briefly point out that we are finding real science value in these edl cam videos here you can see a beautiful new perspective on the jezero delta and if we can get the next image also a new perspective on some of the beautiful stratigraphy around our landing site which is is up near uh uh on the far right side of this image uh so now to put all of this in context for us i'll hand it over to dr thomas zurbukin well what we've seen here today is really nothing short of amazing you know and i perhaps you've had moments like this before some of you have told me that i was too young to remember but they had a moment like that for example when they observed the first landing on the phone they had moments like that where it felt that we took a big leap a big leap not just in this case because of at jpl or at nasa but at big loop as humanity uh of course it's a leap that was enabled by work over decades and on this mission for close to a decade so what's possible today or feels possible is different even and yesterday it's how it feels to make history and i just that's how i feel today i'm so moved by this wow the video of perseverance to sand and landing and the amazing panorama and the first white landscape shot of jesuit scene with human eyes and the first martian sounds are the closest you can get the landing on mars without putting on a pressure suit that video i believe should become mandatory view for young people who not only want to explore other worlds and build spacecraft to take them there but also want to be part of diverse teams achieving all the audacious goals of our future at the center of that is a team and i'll ask for the next image now you should know i met this team i see me there in a dark suit next to dr laurie glaze the body division director and how he just uh he just talked to you is on his knee and there and he entered ascendant landing team and we met him just hours before that historic landing and i love this picture because of course the event today demonstrates that the human aspect of exploration and that is of course every reason for what we can do at nasa and also why we do things video images here are provided to us are from the surface of mars and sometimes we forget if we look at that well hope it shouldn't get all the fun uh we want to make sure that all of us on earth see and feel what it's like to be on our mars and explore other worlds i'm so excited for the more than one million students who join the mars student challenge and the many more across the world will be inspired by these images released today and even yesterday their journey is also just the beginning just imagine imagine perseverance sitting on a hill recording the next martian landing with a cargo that is basically a rocket and then the first from another world with samples bound for earth that are collected by perseverance now in the near future imagine follow the entry descendant of the first human crew on the planetary surface sometimes in the future these hit future historical way which i'm confident will happen will be enabled by women and men working in diverse teams imagine the goals we can achieve together so what is possible sometimes to address that question it's good to look back and think where we've come from just like my friend mike did earlier we've been on a journey both as a human race for for quite a while now and i don't want to show this next image of sojourner of the pathfinder mission uh which was designed for seven souls or martian days or so maybe 30 ultimately lasted for 85 earth days in 1997. i remember that really this thing clear through pathfinder instead in indeed that you know weighed 23 pounds and i returned a surprising amount of data back to earth and i'm trying a surprising amount of science for many scientists i must say some people didn't it's back quite that much and that's what happened sometimes too when you were in a white bait just like uh we've seen here we've grown from that seat that perseverance is the size of a small car and it's ready for us for the next shine leaves and here's a picture that we're putting up that is one of the many pictures that we're releasing and of course it's a picture one of my absolute favorite and that's a picture of the sample caching system on there because it's that sample caching system that will connect this mission to the samples that will bring back to earth and other historic feed we're working on this system is on the surface of much now i remember just by looking at it before we packed it up from jpl and moved it over then of course uh launched it uh from from the top of a rocket that's my friends it's one of the indelible moments in nasa's history where what we can see and what we can learn and what we can hope for in the future and the extraordinary emotions that takes makes us feel all of us coming together that human element will fill our future at mars which is bright indeed and it will fuel the dreams of a new generation and will return to mars and also study the samples that we will eventually bring home i'm so grateful to this team and literally the thousands both at jpl and within the us and around the world to all of you who have engaged in this mission as has been noted the raw image pipeline is opening up please go take a look at these data and play with them especially those of you uh the children and the youth that have signed up to our educational campaign what can you find in these pictures and who's going to compose the first piece of music with actual mars sound mike matt jennifer al many of you leaders and could not be more proud of both you and your team on behalf of our entire nasa leadership team a heartfelt and the proud thanks to you for the record matt i'm so glad for your idea about these cameras we will learn a lot from that much more than we ever expected and of course this is just a start for the surface team a real work starts now to evaluate the surrounding and start a plan and our trajectory across chessroad crater it's a big team and there are lots of discussions but that's science in action stay with us there is much more amazement to come back to your account thank you thomas and we'll now move on to your questions remember if you are a member of the media on the phone line you can press star one to get into the queue if you're on social media you can tag questions with the hashtag countdown to mars now starting on the phone line is bill harwood from cbs news yeah hi um i guess it's a pharrell or maybe for matt i mean other than the the loose spring you guys on the heat shield is there anything at all in that video that looked off nominal i mean you know it looked like it was almost textbook um and i'm not saying that just to i don't know give you free praise but i didn't see you know i don't see anything like that so is there anything thanks and we've been i can take that when uh we've been pouring over those videos and looking for anything that uh that could be wrong and also looking at the rest of the data and we did have a pretty clean run uh through through entry descent landing uh there are a couple bits of the uh pair of the parachute lid that came off some of that was expected in fact we knew that there was some risk of that as well and there was if you look at the video you can actually see a chunk uh that's the uh the radome it's a uh a cover uh for one of the uh pair one of the login antennas we use during cruise and also during part of edl uh that came off uh we had hoped that it wouldn't when we tried to restrain it a little bit better but we knew that it was a risk that it might um so that's something we noticed uh that's on there as well there's a couple other little things that we've been taking a look at uh but i think you're in general right that the the actual ascent landing system behaves as expected and did what it had to do especially given uh and the big shout out to the terrain relative navigation system which put us down uh in the safest spot that was available to us the places that we had to choose from weren't great if we didn't have something like three and although navigation so yeah the landing system worked great great thanks al and up next we have marcia dunn from the associated press yes hi um wonderful video i'm just wondering did the jpl team get to see snippets coming down in the video um and then or did you have to wait until this one minute video was put together what was the reaction when you saw first saw the video and laid eyes on it and and for david um why do you think mike didn't work during defense thank you i could say a couple words about the um the first part i had trouble leaving this mission support area this week just because i kept waiting for every little bit of information to come back from particularly from these cameras but from the vehicle in general and i can tell you every time we got something people were overjoyed giddy they were like kids you know in a candy store uh you know we get a little bit we get a thumbnail which literally is just a really low res blobby looking thing of of one of those videos that came down first and we'd just be falling on the floor excited with what we were seeing and that's before even the high-res came you know there's a lot of people that have contributed to to this entry descent and landing system our our chief engineer adam stelzner happens to be here in the uh the studio he was kind of the father of the sky crane system this started 15 years ago for him he and his team have never seen this system operate before not even on the earth because we can't test it on the earth so this is the first time we've had a chance as engineers to actually see what we designed and uh i just can't it's hard for me to uh express just how emotional it was and how exciting it was for everybody as we got this information down i'll turn it over to dave to say a couple words before you said that can i just chime in on the the first image of this justin i will say um when when we get these first image any of these imaging systems the test images never look as good as the real thing it's not even close in fact it's very hard to simulate a lot of these things especially these you know sky cranes and things and so the images that we normally see during test programs are you know there's always like a ladder in the background or the lighting's never quite right or there's a car in the case of the edl cams where these big targets out in parking lots and we were dodging cars to try to do our tests and things and so that moment that you get these images from mars it's it's just kind of an electric feeling where it just all just snaps into place and you get these pictures that are just like perfectly you know they're pictures of mars that you can never simulate here on earth and i think that we all experience that especially after you we go through months and months of testing and the images don't really look that great and you know people get skeptical like are these these cameras really that great because you know that looks like a garage or something uh so we're it's just amazing to get these pictures and i just i think we all feel that way because we're all seeing pictures of insides of labs and everything and they're never that great that uh it's amazing to get these photos from mars okay i'll give you my take so uh thursday evening and friday when the data started to come down and uh we kind of realized what we had i was sitting at home and my phone started to go off and i was getting face times from people who were in the msa and what was happening was that they were starting to show them on the monitors that we have hanging on the wall and people were turning their phones around and saying girl you got to see this reaction and people were just jumping up and down and giddy and ecstatic and it it was a great feeling i mean from where i was sitting i only was excited to see these videos that we had captured it was also the fact that a lot of people had put a lot of effort in to make this system work and to actually reward that effort and to to pay it back and and get this excitement going it made me super happy i was glad to see that all the hard work all the dedication had come in and that everyone was just excited about uh not only what we captured but also what this mission um could do going for forwards it was a great feeling it was a feeling i won't i won't forget for for quite some time and then regarding the question about the microphone we started to look at it what we think happened is that there was a communication error between uh the device that is responsible for uh digitizing the analog signals that the microphone pick up and then passing them back to the uh the computer that actually stores all the data we're not exactly sure why it could have been a fact it was just so much data coming into the system we tested it but you know obviously everything's a little bit different on mars than we actually have here here on the ground so we were pretty quickly able to determine didn't think there was a hardware issue with the microphone which is why we were able to uh approach the product and get their concurrence to try to turn the microphone on then on that saw ii boundary it's just unfortunate that that error happened during the edl and and we just weren't able to record any of the data that uh that we generated uh during the sequence all right thanks and up next we have chris from the washington post hi uh thanks for taking the time and for showing us i really appreciate it um i wonder if you could talk a little bit about the cameras that were used to record the video i understand they were specially designed maybe a commercial company called fl ir systems just curious to know like what goes into you know designing a camera that's sustaining the the g's the blast of the thrusters everything that it's got to go through to capture that images thanks okay so the cameras were originally purchased from a company called uh point grey uh which was then bought out by flir and i can tell you that uh modifications we made to the camera were minimal this was not a camera specifically designed for use on mars you can purchase the same camera off the internet for whatever applications you might have for it the only things we did is we actually uh added some bonding material on the inside to try to make sure that in the dynamic environment of launch and then that mortar fire event that they talked about uh that the camera will continue to operate and then we had to swap out a couple pieces on the inside because in the vacuum of space they had the ability to outgas material and if that material deposited itself on the detector then we wouldn't get the clear images that we actually got but other than that it was not specially designed for use for this application it is a commercial off-the-shelf camera thank you and up next we have michael sheets from cnc hi congratulations again on catherine's uh stumping footage of this landing i'm curious on two aspects i mean one at adam seltzer you know you guys had said that in 15 years since he really engineered the sky crane you've never actually seen an operation i'm curious what adam thinks about seeing this uh work on a planet and secondarily how this informs and how it's being able to actually see the landing and forms future missions even as nasa looks to one day land astronauts you know what does this really teach you about trying to get people on the surface of mars uh well let's see adam's not up here but i can uh i can channel him for for just a moment perhaps and and tell you that uh you know this is a thrill of a lifetime i think not just for adam but all the people that contributed uh to to this architecture development uh back on curiosity i remember when we first briefed this uh this this system you know with the supersonic parachutes and you know multi-body systems and we're gonna lower this thing on a tether and people just looked at us like we were insane you know and uh adam uh and his team of which al was part you know they kept at it and they explained why it made sense they explained why it was robust they explained why it would work it was not easy to build i will tell you that as as the flight system manager on curiosity but once you build it and once you test it it's something that really is designed inherently to interact with the uncertainties that throw at you throws at you and and so i think being able to see his system operate like this you know in high definition landing at jezreel you know it doesn't get too much better than that i don't think so i'm going to throw it to al he can maybe say a few words about the types of technologies and and information that we have on the technologies on the system and information we got getting back from edl and we'll be getting back as part of our reconstruction activity that feed into the future yeah i mean i think we can talk about a lot of things i mean but as matt matt mentioned you know as a fresh-faced kid uh when this guy was invented and i was in that room and uh it's it's amazing to see it finally in action even though we knew it worked once we didn't know for sure it was going to work again and then for it to work again and then for us to see it is incredible and just starting with skycrane there you can see some things that i think are going to be useful to the future uh one thing that's of course of a lot of interest especially as we start landing bigger things is the plume ground interaction the interaction between those rockets and what they're doing to the ground and how they kick things around and we've got great video of that here this time both from the rover download camera and the descent stage down the camera we can see how those uh how they create those scours and stuff gets pushed together and creates a sheet underneath the rover we can see that all occurring so that's super useful uh the parachute stuff too one thing we didn't show uh necessarily here is that that the parachute upload cameras the two that we got are at 75 frames per second so we can see that inflation that only occurs in you know 0.7 seconds in less than a second and see that snap open and look at all the details of how it unfolds and and how it's symmetrically inflated and all those things are very useful for future missions uh both whether they're landing more things in people or stuff and then people um you know other missions are going to use future missions like the sample retrieval missions are likely going to use things like parachutes and rockets of course so we're very interested in seeing how uh how those those cameras and what we see in the in that in those camera images can teach us about how those systems are actually performing and make our systems more robust in the future thanks alan matt up next we have ken chang from the new york times hi thank you um i wanted to give me a few more details about how the data came back there's 30 gigabytes that was collected how much has come back and what was the data rate that you were able to send the information back thank you maybe jessica can uh so i can say that as part of our commission activity we actually walk the data rate up uh over the course of our different overflights with the orbiters and uh so we start um with two ver a lower rate um two thousand eight thousand and then we mo we increase that into an adaptive data rate with the orbiter in which we can continue to go many uh megabits um i'm sorry two meg eight meg and then uh much further beyond that um over the course the total volume that i don't have off the top of my head and so maybe i don't know if that's something that dave or we can provide for you later justin do you have how many how many images we got back yeah so uh we counted yesterday that we're releasing today there's a about 4 500 that we've gotten so far that we're pushing out to the web today um and i will mention that when the orbiters could fly overhead the compasses typically return let's say 500 to 900 megabits per pass and we've had i don't know we've had a lot of them now like five or ten of them we've typically had two to three over flights per night and it does vary the rates i was referring are the communication rates from the rover to the orbiter and then once that's collected then we're anywhere from you know some passes smaller 80 uh to 100 and where we've had other passes which have been significant amounts of data up at 700 and so it is variable per orbiter and per orientation yeah and i want to add one more thing i wanted to mention about the the camera technology and then this data um we haven't mentioned it but in addition to use commercial cameras um we're using a commercial computer an intel based pc that's running linux open source so it's the first open source at least that i know of open source linux box running on the surface of mars especially inside the rover it's quite compact and so there's the linux operating system and we compress the video using ffmpeg which is another open source tool so thank you to the open source community for allowing us to use your amazing software appreciate it i just uh just very briefly i just want to note as jessica said um you saw some of the terrific imagery from the mars reconnaissance orbiter we've been getting fantastic support from the orbiter community not just mro uh for for both that imagery and the comms uh but also uh from maven which is a goddard space spacecraft from odyssey one of our older orbiters uh in isa european uh trace gas orbiter as well some of the biggest data volume passes we've had brought back a lot of this imagery came from our partners in europe and so thank you all to them okay and up next on the phone lines is mike wahl from space.com thank you all for doing this and yeah yeah it's really amazing video thanks for sharing it um just yeah there's a question for for dave um what do you anticipate doing maybe with with the edl mic now that it's up and running do you see it having any kind of diagnostic uses during the deployments of the robotic arm and sort of like like the instrument checkouts and so forth um yeah i mean what do you see it doing aside from recording martian wind and the sound of the dirt under the wheels and so on thank you yes we've had a lot of discussion about how we might be able to use both the edl cam microphone and the super cam microphone to do those type of diagnostic stuff i mean the ops team right now i don't want to jessica but they're focused on getting the system deployed and capturing noise of that is definitely not the first priority they need to focus on getting this vehicle ready to perform some amazing science but that doesn't mean in the future we could not sit down and discuss the possibility of capturing audiophiles of an actuator as it actually uh spins on the surface of mars um you know that the noise is an incredible thing that engineers can use to basically detect the health of moving systems gears and actuators and things like that and so if we get a snapshot of actuator today and uh you know you can compare over time do another snapshot another audio file of that of that actuator in the future compare the two and see if there's anything that can be learned in terms of the health of that that device now with that said i do need to remind everybody that uh the the microphone that's in the edl camera system just like all of the the cameras and other hardware is off the shelf hardware it is not designed to live in the hostile environment of mars it gets down 120 degrees plus below zero at night and then it warms up significantly more in the day to what minus 40 or something like that so those temperature cycles and that cold temperature are going to significantly limit the life of of these devices they're just not designed to last for long periods of time the supercam microphone might continue to work it actually is designed a little bit more for this particular environment it can last longer so i think you know as you heard i think dr zee mentioned earlier we're always surprised by how rugged and robust some of our items are how long they actually last you know they they continue to operate far longer than we designed them we've gotten pretty lucky over the last couple of days perhaps we'll get lucky and the hardware will continue to operate uh on the surface of mars and allow us to do those type of diagnostic things in the future well jeff you want to add anything more about how you might consider using them uh well i can i can say that that application was one of the things that we had projected and tested and wanted to make sure that even though this was a capability that was part of the cruise and entry descent landing software package that we're operating right now we've also carried that capability forward into our surface software and so um for assuming the hardware is good we were open and ready to use it yeah and i will mention um to the question we we actually have gotten requests from instrument teams wanting to turn on the microphone to observe their instrument functioning moxie is one of the instruments that's going to be generating oxygen has compressors and scroll pumps and things and they actually want to want us to use the microphones to do diagnostic acoustic measurements so i actually think that this might become something that all rovers might want because everybody knows that when you hear something squeaking it's diagnostic maybe you need to check it out and it tells you a little bit about how it works and so we will find out how these get used it's actually kind of exciting and we're getting requests from the teams so we're gonna and we're working to put those into the plan well i'll just say i hope it does survive long enough so that we can hear those wheels crunch over the surface of the planet because i think we would hear it and i think uh it'd be great to hear that big rotary percussive jackhammer drill taking that first sample of a rock on on mars as well i think we'd hear that also so i'm hopeful that that our little microphone will hang in there for for some of those events okay and up next is lisa grossman from science news hi thanks for taking my question um the video is amazing and a lot of it looks a lot like the um animations that you've shown before the landing to to kind of advertise this excuse me going forward how will you distinguish the video that is the real video from the animation to kind of make it clear to people what they're looking at and keep them from getting confused or not be fueled for conspiracy theorists saying we haven't actually done this i guess i could try to take that one i mean i think we should label very clearly which ones are from mars and uh and not uh i think it's clear to a lot of us but i think you're right right given the way that uh the animation's been pretty good uh you getting a good sense for uh for how that could be confusing i think we should label them going forward now that we have this kind of you know we should be clear what's uh what's real what a great problem to have exactly i mean it's an amazing problem [Laughter] justin do you have anything uh anything any thoughts here yeah i i can attest to it's real it's actually real i know because i know the data very well it's it's stunning and it's real and that was our thought too when we first saw it we're like wow this looks like doesn't look real um but it is and that's what's so amazing about it and um you know i i know i've seen some of the video games are getting pretty good you know second glance you look at a sports game and it looks like it's real but it's fake but this is actually real stuff and that's why it's so exciting um and i actually just want to say for those of you that go watch the videos personally i like watching like quarter quarter speed or even slower because there's so much detail in there that anyone who's done animations know that knows that that would take a lot of time to do and it all happened so quickly and the camera cut everything and so that's how that's how we know it's real because we we know so much about these these systems but uh there's just so much detail um that that's that's one way that you could you could look at um but yeah there's one other thing i forgot too i remember early on msl when they started coming up with the animation for uh for curiosity's landing uh we had a discussion about the uh the plumes actually coming out of this end stage uh and the fact that uh that they were clear and that you wouldn't see them uh in real life like you can do you don't see them in the rover opel camera um but uh we thought that it would be uh that people would be expecting to see them in the in the animation so they took some artistic license and putting them there so here i can tell you now that hopefully our future animations will uh will show the right thing and show the uh the clear plumes like you see in the real video yeah the same comment for the exquisite detail on the rover if you actually look at you know every cal targets in place every little twist in every tie cable tie they're all there in the animations you don't have that when you get down to that level of detail at least at least now you you know typically don't because a lot of the things happen kind of last minute and you know the rover's getting built and people slap things on and they're not in the drawing so the animators don't pick it up and that's another thing that's amazing about this video every single detail is in there so encourage people to look at it it's fun thanks justin it really is some beautiful detail now we have a social media question to take jerome on twitter asks some pictures we can see dirt and small rocks inside the real wheel rim was this expected and will it become an issue if more dust and sand is picked up along the way yep i can i can speak to that so uh it's not uncommon for us to have uh rocks and dirt inside the wheels um either from the landing event or as we're driving across the surface you'll also notice on the deck we also experienced some of that debris coming down on top of the rover and we design our mechanisms for these conditions so we don't expect any issue with the material from the landing event or as we continue to surf the rove across the surface thanks jessica and right now we have a call from eric berger on ars technical yes hi thank you very much for doing this congratulations on such a stunning um array of photos and videos um alan chen or al chen mentioned the dust earlier and i it was striking as the spacecraft got close to the surface how much was kicked up it's a one-ton rover it's pretty sizable but you know when you're talking about human missions um it's it's much larger and so you know what does you know what does being able to see this dust tell us about the challenge of landing future kind of much larger spacecraft on mars is that something that you're going to have to account for and if you know is it going to be a really significant issue to deal with thank you yeah i think i take that one i mean i think you know as most people know right there as far as i'm aware there are no landing pads on uh on mars or barges that we can land on uh prepared places so we we're gonna have to deal with especially if we use repulsion where we have to deal with uh this plume ground interaction and it's really difficult it's difficult to get right to get the modeling right to get uh to understand it or even to do a real test that does that shows a good impression of what you're going to come down on especially when you don't know exactly where you're going and what the terrain is like and what the ground properties are where you're coming down so i do think this is a big challenge for us going forward and that's why collecting this information here is useful we can certainly begin to see how it actually behaved in real life and see how things began to move and what those scours are like and we have a vehicle that'll tell us what the ground that we happen to land on was like and we know how we recommend those those engines and where they were pointed so we have a rich treasure trove here that we can use to kind of get at that kind of challenge but because i do think it's a big one especially as we start to land heavier and heavier things with bigger and bigger engines and up next on the phone lines is joey roulette from the verge hey uh thanks for doing this um earlier it was mentioned that scientists are already uh pouring through the thousands and thousands of images and i was just wondering what about um the surface or the rocks that you guys have seen so far from these images are standing out uh and kind of what has been interesting from a scientific perspective thanks ken ken's there yeah okay ken sure uh so uh you can go online and see that image uh that was put up uh during my little bit there but um we're noticing basically the different colors that we see and and textures and tones and and so one thing that's striking to me standing out to me some of us is that um a lot of the the rocks that are labeled as light rocks uh seem to have a rough texture uh whereas some of the darker rocks further afield that that are higher standing more like large boulders um seem to be smoother um that can mean something about the the grain size and the and the potentially the composition uh of the rocks themselves one of the things where we're noting um as the resolution gets better is that these these light rocks uh closer to the foreground may actually be kind of dark on the inside and that the light tone we see may be largely due to dust covering uh and where the rocks stand up a bit higher and have less dust they tend to appear dark so a lot of you know new patterns are emerging um and then of course one of the most exciting and interesting things are these what we call the holy rocks uh that are you know in some cases right under our wheels and these smaller cobbles that are right around the rover um i didn't mention uh but you know one of the possibilities for those holes is that they are what we would call vesicles which would be uh due to gas escape from a volcanic rock we're not calling them vehicles at this point because we it's important for us to stay open to the you know different possible interpretations and not get locked yet on limited data but if they are volcanic that is is enormously important uh to us because it potentially provides an opportunity to get a a really nice radiometric age or an absolute date uh if a sample like that comes back to earth but then again if you go back to to images from many uh previous uh mars missions rovers and otherwise you'll see that that wind abrasion can cause those those sorts of holes in all different types of rocks uh so just a few of the thoughts that are that are emerging and then of course we're starting to get views of the delt front now which just have us you know on cloud nine uh looking at some of the targets further afield that we're excited to explore great thanks ken we have another phone line question mark zastrow from astronomy magazine hi thanks for taking my question um i guess this is a question for al and i was just wondering if you could speak to the performance of the landing vision system if you've gotten a chance to dive into that how the range figure and terrain relative navigation really performed and just sort of what it was thinking how it was making its decisions as it descended uh and then when you look at its performance and accuracy you know how do you judge it and can you see that improvement over curiosity yeah that'd be great i mean i was really hoping for a chance to speak that a little bit actually uh the lander's vision system as part of the train relative navigation system really did great um in fact you know here's some stats right the uh updates on the targeted well we took many images on the way down uh we got tons of landmarks we're real very able to match up what we saw with our onboard map was almost perfect better than many of our field tests or even simulations so we got a very good uh good lock on where we were and in fact when you combine that with our safe target selection and where we flew to we only missed the targeted pixel by by about five meters so we were aiming for a particular spot on the planet once it decided what was reachable and what the safest spot was and given the uh given how well the lander vision system performed and our system in flying is there we only missed by five meters so that was really great i mean i think the uh we've really showed that this system can do what we what we wanted it to do in helping us figure out where to go and go to a safe spot great thanks al we have so many questions coming in that we are going to keep the phone lines open for a little while longer to press start one to get in our queue for now i'm going to take a social media question from bob on twitter who asks how does the processing power of the onboard computer compare to a great smartphone matt do you want to take that one yeah sure that's that's a good question you know in the space business um we have to build things that we know uh are gonna are gonna work and space is a pretty hostile environment and the surface of mars is even worse with the temperature swings which we were talking about you know you need systems that are capable of um of dealing with the radiation and and the temperatures and and really perform with very high reliability so as a result of that we have a tendency to use systems that have been around for a while they're well shaken out uh and on uh on perseverance we're using the same computer that we used on on curiosity in large part because we know it worked and we wanted to have that successful flight heritage that we had from from the previous mission so this is a computer that you know you would have found 15 or maybe even 20 years ago that were flying having said that these edl cameras which we were just talking about are off the shelf you know state-of-the-art new technology and it is always a thrill for us when we have the opportunity like we did in this particular application uh to bring that kind of technology into our systems uh it's a very powerful way to multiply our our uh our functionality and our capability and uh and so this was a great example of being able to use um new technology uh so uh so i don't know if that's uh an exact answer to the question but uh in short that's uh you know that's uh that's a summary great thank you matt and thomas uh we actually have a question for you coming in hayden an 11 year old from ireland on twitter asks what advice would you give to a budding planetary scientist in working towards maybe being part of the mission that will bring back samples to earth in the future well i'm so glad for that question i think about that a lot and the advice would i would give is first of all that's exactly the right time to get into that career braden that that now it could not be a better time to join that career or even if you started 10 years earlier or you know in 10 years now is the time to start that the advice i would give is look uh go really start playing with data right away kind of i mean yes go to school you know the teachers that are there are your allies going forward you know to eventually probably open me perhaps at the university or at an advanced school but go to school do that but the other thing i want to just give you advice on hating this is you know we're putting all these data out be your own researcher learn how to do that kind of go play with it that's what research is so much about and find others who are just excited as excited as you are and i'm sure soon enough we'll have you on our teams in uh in the future that's some great advice thank you thomas and up next we have on the phone lines alexandra witz from nature magazine great thanks very much i'm not quite sure who to address this to but i wanted to ask about insight and whether insight had heard perseverance lending so i'm not sure anybody up here has the latest information have do you al have you heard anything now just heard from other folks on the team i'm not sure this is official or not but that they hadn't seen much yet i think we'd have to check uh to be honest to be sure we got the right answer so great thank you and then another phone line question from jackie goddard from the times of london hello congratulations everyone one of the most common questions that i get from readers who aren't generally a scientific audience but regular folks is what is the point of spending all this money to go to another planet and explore it and sometimes that's not even a question it's a statement there are cynics out there can you say why we explore and how does humanity benefit from you finding out what you find out and doing what you do thank you [Music] yeah why don't i why don't i get started turn it over to you matt is that okay if i start not you good with that yeah so frankly i'm thinking about this question all the time why do we explore and of course when we do that at nasa i just wanna just let everybody know that if you look at how much money we're spending on each planet and the exploration of each planet of course the majority uh kind of that the money where the the planet we're spending most money on of course is the earth the place where we live where our friends live where our history is and we're so where our future is going to be and so we're not confused about the importance and just as excited about the the amazing future of what exploration is uh going forward exploration for us though is broader than just what is useful right now and and the reason we're so convinced that that is important is first of all uh the questions that have driven humanity important questions truly historic questions in so many ways are what we're really about addressing those is what we're really about as humans we want to be sure you know as we look at our contributions of our generations that we really move forward uh what we know and how also uh really affect how we think about ourselves and that so often comes through our research there's a second reason though it's truly secondary but i'm going to mention it anyway so often and surprisingly the results of the technologies that we're building for the very questions that are really driven by fundamental science questions are extremely useful and i just want to remind you that perhaps today whoever asked that question is driving around in a car with a gps system built for an entirely different purpose and looked at the weather forecast with the both was not anticipated when in fact uh we built the first earth satellite so yes we want to uh kind of focus on the immediate needs today and it's really important but it's so critical for us as a species to look forward and explore matthew thanks thomas i i think you said it really well you know i've been landing things on mars now for 25 plus years and so i've had a chance to go out and and talk to a lot of different people and it's it's not unusual when somebody asks this question and and i used to you know have a long list of of reasons uh and there are a good long list of reasons um but but fundamentally i've come to the conclusion that in some ways it's kind of a moot question um because how can we not explore it's just who we are it's what we are it's in our dna you know you almost you couldn't stop us as a species from exploring i don't think i think it's part of the reason why we're you know at the top of the food chain is because we're curious because we want to go to places we haven't been we want to answer questions we don't know the answer to sometimes we want to find the questions we don't even know need to be asked you know it's just it's just part of part of who we are and and it opens new horizons new frontiers it inspires us it inspires kids you know and as as thomas mentioned all the academic programs that that are paying attention here science to technology that that we bring to the table that that's important for us uh you know and uh i think that's the best i can do to answer that question there's a lot of reasons all right we can move on now to another call from matt kaplan from planetary radio hi everyone congratulations uh from not just me but all of the planetary society um i've been texting with uh our boss uh bill nye the science guy who's been watching uh everything along with us and uh here's part of his reaction oh my this is astonishing astonishing dare mighty things but here's my question for ken williford ken getting these first images and video from so much closer to the surface of mars than we have from the orbiters in spite of the great job that they're capable of does this start to make you think about the potential of doing this on a regular basis from balloons or let's say a helicopter well sure you know almost everything i'm thinking about right now is potential um i've uh i guess i've compared it um you know to several people who have asked me how i'm feeling you know what's it like and and the closest thing i can compare it to is i would say the birth of my daughter you know where uh the the cruise phase that's about eight months long you know is like that uh that nine month period where you're just waiting and you're just hoping everything goes right and then and then she's born uh in this case we're on the surface and it's real and the potential is astounding i mean i was just uh katie stack and i were just texting last night as we got some new images down and and we're just you know we're so excited like like kids just looking at every picture and and seeing so many new things and having so many new ideas and new questions are appearing and and the potential of it all is is what strikes me more than anything we have so far to go so so much to learn uh and i just couldn't be more more grateful to have made this transition from from all the years of hard work and and stress and wondering you know is it going to work out how's it going to work out to now when we actually get to do this thing uh it it's just it's it's amazing thanks ken and up next we have irene klotz from aviation week thanks uh just looking ahead a bit um what's been they put it's probably for jessica have you made any progress homing in on a site for the helicopter flight demos and if so about how far from the perseverance landing site are those so the team has started to evaluate um and is uh using the images that we've received from entry descent landing as well as now these uh images that we've acquired over the last couple saws uh we are fortunate to have landed in a potential spot for that but the team is still evaluating and uh is looking forward to additional imaging from the 360 degree panorama from the mass chem z as well as a future data that's to come down so we have not locked in a site yet and that will still be work for the team uh to go looking forward uh whether it's here or a few 100 meters away and we have a social media question coming in jake who is 12 years old on youtube asks was there one point you thought that this would be impossible to do that that's a that's a great question jake um there might have been many points when it felt a little impossible i'll just i'll give you my one moment and then the other folks may may want to add in and that's uh you know last march when the uh kova pandemic struck you know we just um we were we just shipped the spacecraft down to kennedy dave gruel who believe it or not this whole edl camera gig is is is not what he does for a living he was our assembly test and launch operations manager and he along with his deputy art thompson were responsible for assembling the flight spacecraft testing it and getting it down uh to the launch pad for for launch that's actually what he did for a day job so so the pandemic struck about a year ago and dave and i and art and others were just constantly on the phone trying to figure out how to react to it and how to respond to it you know we um i said it before we didn't have a lot of margin we didn't have a lot of time um you know we were we were figuring out a lot of things as quickly as we could and our focus was shifted from trying to get the spacecraft built and tested correctly and staying on schedule for the launch because if you miss it you gotta wait two years for these planetary launches to mars um and suddenly our whole focus had to change to keeping the people safe and keeping their family safe as a number one priority and i wasn't sure honestly i wasn't sure we could do that i knew that if we couldn't keep them just as safe as they would be at home doing other things that you know that that could be that could be it for us for this for this opportunity we got tremendous support across the board from the institution here at jpl from headquarters thomas and and smd and we got through it but um that was the existential moment for me that that very uh that that time right there the first three to six weeks um after after code would really hit hard so anybody else same answer yeah exactly same answers okay i'll add to that um one of the things about that's interesting about this this these jobs we have are we spend years i mean seven or eight years for me and all these guys with years and years years of work building testing making sure it's going to work and you know i have to say there's some kind of stress involved when you spend seven years of your career doing something and then it all comes down to like one moment and for me it's obviously like those first images that come from the cameras like you really want that to work like really really want it to work and you've tried everything you can do to make sure to work and so um but you know it's definitely you know we're we all we try to be open-minded about what could go wrong uh we try to cover cover all our bases and um that's what's one of the great things about jpl is that there's a team of people here really smart people uh you go to these reviews uh to review your product your your designs um we call them withering reviews you get you get a lot of tough questions but that's one of the really you know jpl is a real gem of the place because we built this culture of always questioning um what could go wrong um but hoping for the best and and it's it's a really interesting experience i think we all share that i will agree i think we invite the feedback from each other and our reviewers to make sure that we are thinking about all the things that we need to think about and pushing ourselves to meet those challenges and uh and of course you want it all to work but um you know there are some things that you know you worry that you didn't think about um but as a community and as a collective and as you know a team you know we use each other to help make sure that we're covering those bases i mean the team really did persevere and we are here today uh up next is leo enright from irish television thanks very much raquel uh i i just realized there's no doubt about it 12 year olds definitely ask the best questions but if you'll forgive me for um going geeky on this could somebody talk to the traversibility of canyon duchess now that you've seen these amazing pictures do you think that you can just simply turn around the rover and head directly west northwest possibly right past the descent stage or realistically are you going to have to go to the northeast um around olympic and then to uh chaman foyer i'm sorry for being geeky but it's kind of a serious question can you move quickly so i can uh i'll comment and all that can comment also uh you know we have uh spent you know as we do in our development program as we were mentioning you know a lot of time in different conditions to evaluate the performance of our system and one of the things that we did on this mission compared to other missions was to enhance that traversability capability with enhanced autonomous navigation and as well as processing while we're driving so to increase our drive rates now we have many more images and still to assess in terms of evaluating our path forward but i will let ken speak to maybe some of the areas that we are interested in pursuing and what's really great is that we work together you know with the science and engineering team to evaluate those paths and what sort of terrain is the best for our system yeah so it's a great question and it's it's our major focus right now on the science team is is answering exactly that question uh what are we going to do what do we want to do uh where do we want to go uh and i'll say first of all we're so extraordinarily happy about exactly where we've put down because we ended up right on this major geologic feature this contact we call it between two two differently mapped units and so you see there's this sort of um uh undulating feature uh that you know this sort of obvious line um that we're landed right next to and that's the big contact one of the major features we were hoping to explore in this mission and it it uh presents for us uh one of the big mysteries uh i mentioned the you know the possible vesicles uh it gets down to one of the big questions for us early on is what is that crater floor uh made of and are there igneous rocks there sedimentary rocks both uh you know there's a lot of implications for both so so what i would say we're probably currently leaning toward is is exploring that contact which would not lead us more i think to the second um of the two options but we'll see we we've got a good amount of time while the team does the commissioning and checks all the systems out and during that time we'll be digesting all those new images and doing a lot of strategic planning evaluating different options um arguing amongst ourselves in the team right after this this uh press conference is over our first science team meeting post landing starts immediately after that so we'll we'll start talking about just those things so we'll see okay thank you jessica and ken uh up next we have stephen gorman from reuters news hi thank you very much can you hear me okay yes we can yeah so my question is i have like a question about the superlatives regarding the video footage of the edl sequence and the audio of that gust of wind that was picked up on the martian service by the by the microsoft so i believe is it correct to say this this video marks the first sort of moving footage of a spacecraft from a spacecraft from that thing uh showing it's it's it's uh descent and and landing on the surface of another world you know mars or any world i think right i don't see that including the moon or an asteroid or anything and then secondly is this likewise is this the first sound recording ever made on mars or any celestial object on earth or just the first one that was made that's been played back on earth i don't know if you could just clarify that i can um let's see on your on your first question uh putting aside the apollo program and the moon and just talking about planets uh this is most certainly i'm pretty sure as far as i know this is the first time we're able to see ourselves see our spacecraft land on another planet and uh and hopefully that that answers uh the question that you you asked um as far as sound i'm not sure anybody else has any more information but again is to the best of my knowledge this is the first planetary sound that's been recorded so yeah go ahead justin i can i can i can add to that uh in terms of sound the the um the insight lander has a seismometer on it and they did measure uh seismic signals that were acoustically driven and then rendered that as as audio so that that could be potentially another another one but in terms of like imaging and doing video msl did have a descent imager that did video uh three and a half frames per second so it was a little slower um that was the marty instrument um we've also done time lapse of deployments of things on inside you know we deployed a seismometer and we do time lapse video mars pathfinder we did time lapse video of the rover driving down onto the surface uh but then again it was it's time lapse you know so seconds in between frames so it you know it's you you've probably seen this they're all out on the internet the the rover movies um i worked on that as a postdoc actually but this is definitely the best video of any of them so i think we can at least say that pretty definitively it's it's just it's a whole nother level of of capabilities that we now have so great well that is all the time we have for questions today thank you so much to our panelists we unfortunately can't answer all the media questions on there for those with additional questions please call jpl's digital news and media office our social media team will continue to answer questions online and we have a reddit ama with perseverance team members starting at 1pm pacific time today now to see the raw images of mars visit mars.nasa.gov mars 2020 slash multimedia slash raw dash images for more updates on the mission visit nasa.gov perseverance and mars.nasa.gov perseverance and you can also follow us on social media using at nasa persevere i'm required thanks for watching i'm starting to straighten up and fly right maneuver where the spacecraft will jettison the entry balance masses in preparation for parachute deploy and to roll over to give the radar a better look at the ground application shoot deploy the navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed and we are seeing significant deceleration in the velocity our current velocity is 450 meters per second at an altitude of about 12 kilometers from the surface of mars heat shields up press advance has now slowed to subsonic speeds and the heat shield has been separated this allows both the radar and the cameras to get their first look at the surface current velocity is 145 meters per second and an altitude of about 10 km nine and a half kilometers above the surface now filter converge velocity solution 3.3 meters per second altitude 7.4 kilometers now has radar lock on the ground current velocity is about 100 meters per second 6.6 kilometers of the surface first advance is continuing to descend on the parachute we are coming up on the initialization of terrain relative navigation and subsequently the priming of the landing engines our current velocity is about 90 meters per second at an altitude of 4.2 kilometers ovf valid we have confirmation that the lander vision system has produced a valid solution and part of training relative navigation rhyming is nominal we have timing of the landing engines back shelf current velocity is 83 meters per second at about 2.6 kilometers from the surface mars we have confirmation that the back shell has separated we are currently performing the divert maneuver current velocity is about 75 meters per second at an altitude of about a kilometer off the surface of mars here in safety bravo we have completed our terrain relative navigation current speed is about 30 meters per second altitude of about 300 meters off the surface of mars we have started our constant velocity accordion which means we are conducting the sky crane about to conduct the flight crane maneuver skytrain maneuver has started about 20 meters off the surface we're getting signals from mro tango delta touchdown confirmed perseverance faithfully on the surface of mars ready to begin seeking the sands of past life you [Applause] you

Channel: NASA

Views: 5,745,229

Rating: 4.8792491 out of 5

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Id: gYQwuYZbA6o

Length: 111min 40sec (6700 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/1_p_freely]

They don't want this thing rebooting in the middle of a mission to automatically install more freemium games from the Microsoft Store without permission.

[u/BlackXanthus]

Man, I would totally be involved in helping build that software, even if just to get a comment I write going to Mars. That would be some awesome claim to fame. My code is on Mars. It's not, but I sure would like it to be!

[u/ExploreTrails]

First thing I thought when NASA JPL thanked Linux.

just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu - Linus Torvalds 1991

[u/lazystingray]

I joked with my son last weekend, "I bet they're using FFMPEG...", my exact words.

[u/TIL02Infinity]

The Mars Perseverance Rover does not run the Linux operating system, it runs the VxWorks real-time embedded operating system from Wind River Systems (www.windriver.com), which was previously owned by Intel.

The Mars Ingenuity Helicopter that Perseverance carried underneath is running Linux.

Perseverance has two radiation hardened BAE Systems 200 MHz RAD750 PowerPC single core processors (one is a backup) with 256 MB of RAM. Perseverance is the second Mars rover to utilize the RAD750 after the NASA Curiosity rover landed in 2011. The earlier NASA Spirit and Opportunity Mars Rover's had 20 MHz RAD6000 PowerPC processors. All four of these rovers run VxWorks, as does the NASA Mars InSight mission that landed in November 2018.

Ingenuity has a Qualcomm 2.226 GHz Snapdragon 801 quad-core ARM processor that is many times more powerful than the RAD750. However, Ingenuity requires much more processing to perform its autonomous flight algorithms.

Ingenuity is a 4 pound technology demonstration that is aiming for 5 test flights over the first 30 days on Mars. The test flights will only go up to around 16 feet and last for up to 90 seconds. On the other hand, Perseverance has a nuclear power source that could last up to 14 years. Curiosity has been operating on Mars for over 8 1/2 years and has now travelled over 15 miles.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon-processors-801

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/brains/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_computer_systems_on_board_the_Mars_rovers

https://www.pcmag.com/news/4-android-smartphones-with-as-much-power-as-nasas-mars-helicopter

https://bgr.com/2020/07/30/perseverance-rover-life-span-battery-power/

https://blogs.windriver.com/wind_river_blog/2021/02/the-ultimate-mission-critical-intelligent-system-fourth-generation-mars-rover-running-wind-river-technology/

[u/JustMrNic3]

A donation tho those open source projects would be even better...

[u/Ooyyggeenn]

What version of linux kernel is it running?

[u/doa379]

Bring the rover back after finishing with it.