Mars 2020 Perseverance rover landing

[Bryanpoprobson]

[bknight]

Excelent video.

[JayUtah]

That's how I want to be lowered into my grave.

[Peter B]

Just an awesome video. Thank you for posting it.

The best bit for me was near the end with the three simultaneous images. Looking down to see the dust swirling on the ground is exciting, as was looking down from the descent module to the rover as it touched down. But the most special image for me was looking up from the rover to the descent module, seeing the engines from below.

Now while the three simultaneous videos are cool, what I'd like to see (because I wish I had the skills to do this) is a fully integrated video of the landing sequence. For example, when we look down at Mars when the heat shield was dropped, were we at any point looking at the actual landing site? What were the altitude and rate of descent at times other than when they were being announced? What was the status of the spacecraft during various points of the descent (for example, what was the period of time between the parachute being discarded and the descent engines being fired)?

(For an idea of what I'd like to see, I recently found again a video of the descent of Huygens to the surface of Titan which displays almost all of the data available, accompanied by a soundtrack created by linking sounds to various activities: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/10064/musical-descent-to-titan/

[raven]

That is just gob-smacking gorgeous. Gave me literal shivers. Thank you so very much for sharing. No doubt a Scott Manley vid going over every detail is in the works, but just watching was, wow, just so much wow.

[JayUtah]

Seriously, most of us have spent our entire careers having to imagine what our little robots were doing thousands or millions of kilometers away.  Or worse, imagining what they might have been doing when some indication occurs that it has misbehaved.  It's a leap of faith.  You can see a 40-meter solar panel unfold in the clean room, supported by all the test fixtures and equipment.  But it's not the same.  On orbit, you see an indication that the bus voltage has risen.  So you can infer that the panel deployed.  But that's still just a number on a screen.  Every engineer wishes he were out there in a space suit watching his satellite chassis spread its wings.  And, more importantly, observing with his own eyes when something breaks.

So yeah, even seeing it after the fact, as an actual high-quality video stream, is amazing.  It convinces you the stuff really does work.

[smartcooky]

Oh, and the parachute contained a secret code!

No, seriously, it really did. This is not some froot loop conspiracy theory. The group at JPL who developed the supersonic parachute arranged the colour of the panels to spell out JPL's motto "DARE MIGHTY THINGS" in ASCII code, followed by JPL's map co-ordinates

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/lqgset/oc_decoding_the_stars_visualizing_the_message_in/

This has been confirmed by Perseverance chief engineer Adam Steltzner

"It looks like the internet has cracked the code in something like 6 hours! Oh internet is there anything you can’t do?"

The mismatching red and white stripes were the first clue. Puzzle solvers then converted those into binary code - ones for red, zeros for white. The ones and zeros were then separated into groups of 10, and each of those sections had 64 added to it.

A very neatly conceived and delivered Easter Egg

[raven]

As I was saying about Scott Manley.