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 mars image show perseverance rover


Mars images show Perseverance rover at work

FOX News

New images from NASA show the Perseverance Mars rover hard at work as it searches the Red Planet for signs of ancient microbial life. Since "Percy" landed in Mars' Jezero Crater in February, the agency said the rocks there are beginning to reveal a picture of its history billions of years ago. In a Thursday release, NASA credited Perseverance's seven science cameras for the team's progress "The imaging cameras are a huge piece of everything," Vivian Sun, the co-lead for Perseverance's first science campaign at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement. "We use a lot of them every single day for science. Perseverance looks back with one of its navigation cameras toward its tracks on July 1, 2021 (the 130th sol, or Martian day, of its mission), after driving autonomously 358 feet (109 meters) – its longest autonomous drive to date. The image has been processed to enhance the contrast. NASA shared a photo from Perseverance's navigation cameras on the rover's longest autonomous drive to date, an enhanced-color panorama from the mast's Mastcam-Z camera system, a shot of the crater's "Delta Scarp" taken by Perseverance's Remote Microscopic Imager (RMI) camera and a close-up of a rock target nicknamed "Foux" taken using its WATSON (the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera. After receiving Mastcam-Z images of the scarp and SuperCam RMI to provide a more detailed view of the scarp, SuperCam principal investigator Roger Wiens said the images showed there had been a large flash flooding event that occurred, washing boulders down into the delta formation. Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera system to create this enhanced-color panorama, which scientists used to look for rock-sampling sites. The panorama is stitched together from 70 individual images taken on July 28, 2021, the 155th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. "These large boulders are partway down the delta formation," Wiens, of New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, said. "If the lakebed was full, you would find these at the very top.