Perseverance Finally Spots its Own Parachute on the Surface of Mars

More than 13 months after the Perseverance rover landed on Mars, the rover's cameras have finally spotted some of the parts of the Mars 2020 landing system that got the rover safely to the ground. The image was taken on April 6, 2022.

The rover might have taken a short side-trip early on in the mission to take pictures of the landing system. Perseverance had to drive around some hazardous terrain to get to the large area of Jezero Crater that the science team wanted to study. The rover finally got to the area where the parachute landed. The Skycrane dropped the parachute during the landing so it could lower the rover to the ground.

The parachute had a secret message hidden in the folds and colors of the material.

You can see the traverse map below and the image of the parachute and backshell that was taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image was taken a day after the landing.

The many parts of the descent system can be seen in the HiRISE image of the Perseverance Rover. There is an area of about 200 meters across. The Skycrane lowered the rover to the center of the blast pattern and it sits there. The Skycrane flew off to crash and created a V-shaped debris pattern.

Perseverance is trying to get to the next target location for the mission's second science campaign, an area that looks like a large river delta. The team decided to study South Séítah first, knowing they would have to backtrack later to reach the delta.

Perseverance is going under a tenth of a mile per hour in a drive campaign to reach the delta, which is faster than any previous rover. Perseverance is using an auto-nav feature to make tracks and is making rapid progress by devoting several hours per day to driving on very smooth terrain.

Perseverance has broken previous records by driving on Sol 351 for one day. There were a number of drives over 100 meters, but not many over 200. It was due to rockier terrain. After landing in 2004, Opportunity was able to travel up to 228 meters in one day using solar power, thanks to some very smooth patches of terrain.

The latest news about Perseverance can be found at the team's mission update blog.

The landing system and why Perseverance was able to find the various parts is explained in this great video.

The Perseverance rover's parachute lies on the regolith. The image is MastCam-Z. Kevin M. Gill is a NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU employee.