NASA releases first video, audio from new Mars rover Perseverance

ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 22 (UPI) -- NASA on Monday released a minute-long video, audio clips and thousands of images of the Mars rover Perseverance landing on Mars.

The historic images and sounds were unveiled during a press conference that started at 2 p.m. EST. NASA had expected to collect audio during the descent, but the agency announced Monday that didn't happen.

Two short audio clips from the surface were played, including one that recorded a wind gust. Those clips are the first such recordings from the Martian surface.

The images and the data from the rover showed that it's robotic landing system, called terrain relative navigation, worked well, said Allen Chen, NASA lead engineer for the landing process.

"We really showed that this system can do what we wanted it to do in helping us figure out where to go and go to a safe spot," Chen said.

The video showed the parachute deploying and the rover from above, dangling under its jet pack that provides the final descent. There also were wide views of cliffs, boulders and reddish sand dunes in Jezero Crater, the rover's landing site.

The video records the jetpack flying away after it dropped the rover to the Martian surface.

"We caught a little over 30 gigabytes of information," said Dave Gruel, NASA's camera lead for the project. "And over 23,000 images of the vehicle descending down to the surface of Mars."

The visuals are meant to give NASA more insight about how the agency's Mars landings are accomplished, by robots and sometimes autonomously, hundreds of millions of miles away.

NASA released some still-frame photos of the landing on Friday, but the agency spent the weekend processing the video.

"We're all going to get to experience just exactly what that [landing] was like," Lori Glaze, a NASA director for planetary science, said on Friday. "This will be the first time we've ever had that opportunity -- to not just look at the data that came back. We're gonna get to see it and live it."

Perseverance is the fifth NASA rover to land on Mars, alighting Thursday in the crater on the planet's northern hemisphere.

The landing marks the start of at least a two-year mission to drive through the crater, which NASA believes is an ancient lakebed with river delta. The rover will take rock samples in a hunt for signs of ancient life.

A previous rover, Curiosity, took video of the ground getting closer during its landing in 2012, but Perseverance had several cameras to show different perspectives.

The microphones on the rover may be used to perform diagnostic assessments on various science instruments on the surface, Gruel said.

The images also will be used for a closer look at the Jezero area, which humans have only viewed before only using such spacecraft as NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Depending on what NASA sees, the agency could alter the rover's planned route.

"No one has ever seen it, except from orbital imagery from a few hundred miles up above Mars," said Matt Wallace, NASA's deputy project manager on the mission, on Friday.

Perseverance launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 30.

Dispatches from Mars: Perseverance rover sends images

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its left Mastcam-Z camera on Thursday. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover's mast. Photo courtesy of NASA | License Photo

Perseverance documents the Martian surface. Photo courtesy of NASA | License Photo

The Martian surface is documented is detail from Perseverance. Photo courtesy of NASA | License Photo

The navigation cameras aboard the Mars rover captured this view of the rover’s deck on Monday. This view provides a look at PIXL (the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), one of the instruments on the rover’s stowed arm. Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

This panorama, made by the navigation cameras aboard Perseverance, was stitched together from six individual images after they were sent back to Earth. Subsequent missions, currently under consideration by NASA in cooperation with the European Space Agency, would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis. Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

This is the first high-resolution, color image to be sent back by the Hazard Cameras (Hazcams) on the underside of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover after its landing on February 18. Photo courtesy of NASA | License Photo

This high-resolution still image, from the camera aboard the descent stage, is part of a video taken by several cameras as NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on Mars. Photo courtesy of NASA | License Photo

Perseverance can be seen falling through the Martian atmosphere in the descent stage, its parachute trailing behind, in this image taken on Thursday by the High-Resolution Imaging Experiment camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The ancient river delta, which is the Perseverance mission's target, can be seen entering Jezero Crater from the left. Photo courtesy of NASA | License Photo

An illustration depicts the rover driving in the foreground across the plain of Jezero Crater, where the robotic explorer landed safely. Image courtesy of NASA

An image showing where Perseverance Mars rover landed is shown during a NASA Perseverance rover mission post-landing update, on February 18, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Photo by Bill Ingalls/NASA | License Photo

Members of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover team watch in mission control as the first images arrive moments after the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars. Photo by Bill Ingalls/NASA | License Photo

The first photos taken by NASA's Perseverance Mars rover after landing on the Martian surface. A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. Photo courtesy of NASA | License Photo

These computer simulations show Perseverance landing on the Martian surface. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith. Image courtesy of NASA | License Photo

In this illustration of its descent to Mars, the spacecraft carrying NASA's Perseverance rover slows down using the drag generated by its motion in the Martian atmosphere. Hundreds of critical events must execute precisely on time for the rover to land on Mars safely. Entry, descent, and landing, or "EDL," begins when the spacecraft reaches the top of the Martian atmosphere, traveling nearly 12,500 mph. The cruise stage separates about 10 minutes before entering into the atmosphere, leaving the aeroshell, which encloses the rover and descent stage, to make the trip to the surface. Image courtesy of NASA | License Photo

An illustration of Perseverance on Mars, launched from Earth in July. It is the fifth rover to successfully reach Mars, and is the first of three that may return rocks samples to Earth. Image courtesy of NASA | License Photo