Perseverance rover has sent back stunning video and audio from Mars

NASA's Perseverance rover has sent back astonishing video footage of its 18 February landing on Mars. These videos give us the most intimate look ever at the process of setting a spacecraft down on the Martian surface. During the landing, five cameras took videos: two on the back of the capsule holding the rover, one on the sky crane that acted as a jet pack to lower the rover its final 2000 metres or so to the surface and two on the rover itself. The videos show the parachute opening to slow down the spacecraft, and then the heat shield dropping to the surface of Mars once Perseverance is moving slow enough not to need it anymore. "You can get a sense really of how violent that parachute deploy and inflation are," said Al Chen, a Perseverance engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, during a press conference.