Perseverance's Landing on Mars, Seen From Its Own Cameras

NASA's Mars 2020 mission landed the Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, and filmed the whole descent. The footage in NASA's video comes from several cameras in the rover's entry, descent and landing suite, and the soundtrack is mission control's live call-outs.

The cameras

• one on the descent stage — a rocket-powered jet pack that flies the rover to its landing site — looking down;
• one on the rover looking up at the descent stage;
• one on top of the aeroshell, the capsule protecting the rover, looking up at the parachute;
• one on the bottom of the rover looking down at the Martian surface.

The descent, step by step

1. Straighten up and fly right. The spacecraft dropped its entry balance masses to prepare for the parachute and rolled over to give its radar a better view of the ground.
2. Parachute. Navigation confirmed that the parachute had opened and the spacecraft was slowing sharply: about 450 meters per second at roughly 12 kilometers above the surface.
3. Heat shield off. Slowed below the speed of sound, Perseverance dropped its heat shield, letting the radar and cameras see the surface for the first time. It was moving at 145 meters per second at about nine and a half kilometers.
4. Radar lock. The radar locked onto the ground while the rover kept descending under the parachute, approaching the start of terrain-relative navigation and the timing of the landing engines.
5. Terrain-relative navigation. The lander vision system produced a valid solution as part of terrain-relative navigation, and the landing engines were timed.
6. Backshell separation and divert. The backshell separated and the descent stage began its divert maneuver, at about 75 meters per second and about a kilometer up.
7. Sky crane. With terrain-relative navigation complete, at about 30 meters per second and about 300 meters up, the descent stage slowed to a constant-velocity descent. The sky crane maneuver began about 20 meters above the surface.
8. Touchdown. Mission control confirmed touchdown to cheers: Perseverance was safely on Mars, ready to start searching for signs of past life.

Sources

• NASA/JPL-Caltech, NASA Image and Video Library: "Perseverance Rover's Descent and Touchdown on Mars: Onboard Camera Views." The mission control call-outs are rewritten in hubnx's own words; a few are inaudible in the recording, and figures that are unclear in the transcript are left out.