Mars helicopter spots wreckage from Perseverance landing

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA said that new pictures from the Ingenuity helicopter offer a new perspective on the aftermath of the Perseverance rover landing on Mars.

The Perseverance rover was launched in 2020 and was designed to find signs of life on Mars. Scientists on Earth hoped that the Ingenuity helicopter would allow them to see sights that the rover couldn't.

The seven minutes of terror is the time it takes forPerseverance to descend onto the Martian surface. The heat shield helped protect the rover from the intense heat of reentering and slowed it down. The massive parachute deployed out of the backshell, slowing it down even more. The backshell and parachute were separated from Perseverance and used to gently lower the rover to a smooth landing.

On April 19th, Ingenuity took photographs of the remains of Perseverance's parachute and the rover's protective backshell, which helped protect the rover on its way to the surface. The debris from where the two crashed into the surface was found around the site. According to NASA, the backshell hit the ground at 78 miles per hour. The parachute, the lines connecting it to the craft, and the coating on the backshell all survived the trip to the surface, NASA says, though more analysis of the pictures will happen in the coming weeks.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Ian Clark, a former engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA post thatPerseverance had the best documented Mars landing in history. It will be amazing if they either reinforce that our systems worked as we think they worked or provide a single dataset of engineering information that we can use for Mars Sample Return planning. The pictures are still amazing.

The first object to achieve powered flight on another world was the Ingenuity helicopter. Ingenuity's mission was extended after it became clear that this could be achieved.

The Perseverance team is looking to use Ingenuity to help them decide which path they should take to get to the top of Jezero Crater, which scientists think is the best chance to find signs of ancient life on the planet.