NASA’s Perseverance rover watched as its sky crane crashed on Mars (photograph)

The Perseverance Mars rover’s “sky crane” descent stage made the final sacrifice final week, and now we have a photograph to memorialize the flying robotic’s courageous death.

The rocket-powered sky crane lowered the automotive-sized Perseverance rover to the flooring of Mars’ Jezero Crater on cables final Thursday (Feb. 18), bringing the rover’s harrowing “seven minutes of fright” entry, descent and touchdown (EDL) sequence to a winning end. 

Ultimate after the rover’s wheels touched down, the sky crane flew off to shatter-land deliberately a right distance away — and Perseverance snapped a photograph of the impact’s rapid aftermath, NASA announced Wednesday (Feb. 24).

Video: Perseverance spots sky crane’s Mars impact plume after touchdown


Related: NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission in images

“A 2nd of appreciate for the descent stage. Within two minutes of safely turning in me to the surface of Mars, I caught the smoke plume on one amongst my Hazcams [hazard-avoidance cameras] from its intentional surface impact — an act that right me and the scientific integrity of my touchdown problem,” company officers wrote by the mission’s legitimate Twitter fable, @NASAPersevere.

Perseverance documented its EDL in unprecedented detail, capturing high-definition video with extra than one cameras as it blazed by the Martian sky against Jezero’s flooring. That story video shows key events within the touchdown sequence, along with the deployment of the mission’s supersonic parachute and the 2nd the rover’s six wheels hit the purple dirt.

Other robotic eyes had been gazing on Thursday as properly. As an instance, the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the Pink Planet since 2006, snapped a photograph of Perseverance gliding by the alien skies under its parachute. And a day later, HiRISE imaged mission hardware on the bottom — no longer appropriate Perseverance, but additionally its sky crane, heat protect and parachute-backshell combo of their varied resting spots within Jezero.

Perseverance is the centerpiece of the $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, which is prepared to hunt for indicators of worn existence and receive and cache dozens of samples for eventual return to Earth. The rover is quiet going by its put up-touchdown checkouts, but it has already begun imaging its environment in detail.

As an instance, the mission team appropriate released a high-definition, 360-stage panorama of the touchdown problem stitched together from 142 images captured by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z camera blueprint. The beautiful photograph affords our simplest look yet at Jezero Crater, which lengthy ago harbored a river delta that spilled correct into a lake many of of feet deep.

We’ll be taught grand extra about this mysterious problem after Perseverance gets fully up and running. So protect tuned!

Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There” (Broad Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the look for alien existence. Note him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Note us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.