Nasa scientists release new images of Perseverance rover on Mars at news briefing – as it happened

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Have you typed “perseverance” into Google today?

Now that Perseverance persevered through the “seven minutes of terror” – a new era of space exploration has officially begun.

Next up, the science team will make crucial decisions on which direction to take the rover in as it kicks off its search for ancient life.

The event is concluding. They’ll be back for a 2pm ET news conference on Monday. Mission updates can be found meanwhile on the Nasa web site.

McGregor signs off:

“Everyone have a great day, on Earth and on Mars.”

Nasa scientists have worked for years to support this mission, and kept things going despite the ongoing coronavirus disruption.

After the landing success yesterday, one team says they had a “socially distanced ice cream” event, while the engineering team had a virtual happy hour!

Next question: How did you celebrate?

Answers include:

• Virtual happy hour
• “Socially distanced consumption of ice cream outdoors”
• “I went home and just passed out from just the excitement of the day”
• “In the coming days I’ll definitely be having a glass of wine”
• “It was super-exciting”
• “We’re working two shifts a day almost 20 hours a day... it is kind of a really cool thing”
• “Business as usual for a science team working on a Mars rover”

Another key question: When will the rover drive?

“We’re anticipating the earliest... would be sol 8 or 9... our current best estimate.

“Maybe a short drive just to check everything out...

“We’ll also be figuring out the route and direction we need to go.”

That means rover could rove before February is out.

The team members have described their fascination with the holes in the rocks visible next to the rover’s wheel in this photograph just released by Nasa. It is unknown whether the holes indicate volcanic or sedimentary rock.

Attached to the rover’s belly is a diminutive helicopter called Ingenuity.

The 1.8kg drone-like rotorcraft is the first flying machine ever sent to another planet — it has the ability to take colour pictures and video. The rover can also take images of Ingenuity.

Key question: how long till they fly the helicopter?

“Caveat caveat caveat,” the scientist says. “Super-fast” would be “sol 60.” With a sol being 37 minutes longer than and earth days, that would be 60 earth days plus 37 hours = 61 days, 13 hours. Sometime in April. Best-case scenario.

The landing site, Jezero crater, was picked from more than 60 candidates because of its promise for preserving signs of life.

Billions of years ago the site was once home to an ancient lake and river delta that may have collected and fossilised Martian microbes.

Morgan mentions “future human exploration.”

The rover can track dust storms, she says. They are monitoring the weather daily.

“We are very interested in knowing what the weather is like on Mars every day,” she says.

Morgan says the area where the rover landed might be volcanic basalt. Was there lava involved? Or are these sedimentary rocks?

“Perseverance has the payload to help us figure this out,” she says.

“These could be lake sediments that we’re seeing,” she says.

They need to take photos and samples. They have hypotheses and they are looking to test them.

The crater is 3.8-3.9bn years old and the deposits in the crater are probably between 3.6-3.8bn years old, they say. At the time water was stable on Mars. It sounds like a sweet spot on Mars for investigating for traces of ancient life.

We are still waiting on whether Perseverance’s audio works — if it does we might, for the first time, hear the sounds of Mars.

Nasa has tried to incorporate microphones in two previous missions Unfortunately, one of the missions, the Mars Polar Lander, failed.

The Phoenix Lander had a microphone on the spacecraft’s descent camera, but that instrument was never turned on.

Next question: how did this landing compare to the last rover landing, Curiosity?

Steltzner says “last night went as smoothly as we would want it to go.”

He says they hit a “pool-table flat” landing site.

They’re going through the data to see if they could do it better.

But basically it sounds like they feel like they nailed it.

The mission team will honour a tradition of planetary exploration by temporarily shifting to a 24-hour, 37-minute Martian “day” (otherwise known as a sol) to make the most out of Perseverance’s first weeks on the red planet.

The next question is about how many pictures they’ve gotten back – and is there audio? And what was the reaction to seeing the touchdown?

“I can definitely say that when we saw this image, seeing the rover hanging underneath the sky crane... it was stunning, and the team was awestruck, and there was just a feeling of victory.”

Well-earned. They don’t have a count on total images but they have “more than I can count” thumbnail images. Mars is in process of being heavily documented.

Hwang says “we went wild” when they saw the first images. “The team just went crazy for... we were just kind of like on cloud nine... weird, dreamlike state.”

“Just the clarity, and just the reality of it, it was just unbelievable.”

Hwang continues. She describes a “set of deliberate steps” to achieve the software update.

Sounds like it will work.

Next question is, why aren’t all the cameras color? Why black-and-white?

The reply: B&W brought down takes up less data volume. It’s actually higher quality.

“Almost all the cameras on this vehicle will be color.”

You can hear the joy and relief in each scientists’ voice — Mars has an unforgiving environment, there have been multiple failures in the past.

The fact that everything has gone smoothly so far was hardly preordained.

They go to the phones, for the Q&A portion of the event.

The first question is about the software update. Will the rover boot back up once it’s done?? Good question, and highly relatable.

Hwang says they’ve done this before with Mars rovers and “it’s always been part of our baseline plan” to transfer software.

The software update is slow and deliberate, she says. Generally reassuring tones here.

Morgan says the rocks on Mars have observable holes. Are they volcanic or sedimentary? Either way it’s exciting, she says.

“We can’t wait to get this science mission started,” she says.

Deputy Project Scientist Katie Stack Morgan is up next. She describes how the team mapped the landing zone for the rover – years in advance.

“We have a lot of interesting science to do,” she says. And gets into a technical description of what kind of terrain the rover will cross, versus where it landed and what kind of rocks it might encounter.

One of the big challenges Nasa scientists were worried about was rocky landscape of the Jezero crater and whether Perseverance’s camera’s would allow her to make a safe landing avoiding the uneven landscape.

And she has, landing on relatively flat ground.

A team member tries to call up a camera image but it does not appear at first. Even Nasa has IT issues.

Then the caps of the cameras on the rover come off and we see a new picture of reddish rocks.

“This is our first color image from the surface of Mars.” Not a color-corrected photo.

Hwang describes rather technical next steps to get the rover up and active. Lots of camera work, lots of panorama, downlinking of image data and more “through our orbiter assets.”

“We do think we’re going to get a lot of good image data.”

After that the rover gets new flight software. Then they will be “fully ready to begin to next set of checkouts and upgrades with the robotic arm” etc.

Cosmic care & maintenance in short.

Hwang has a model of the rover and is explaining how the cameras work.

She says they have not moved any of the cameras or other mechanisms – they’ve just released them.

They have sent commands to the device and received replies, she says.

“The rover’s doing well.”

“We’re only at 1 degree tilt.”

It’s flat there.

The front side of the rover is pointing south-southeast. It’s 1pm on Mars apparently.

Perseverance had a long rough ride. Nasa engineers say she’s healthy, which is a relief because her journey has only just begun.

Pauline Hwang, Surface Mission Operations Systems (MOS) Manager, reports that Perseverance is doing “awesome”:

The Rover is doing great and is healthy on the surface of Mars, and continues to be highly functional... Awesome.”

The scientists express satisfaction with the safety of the landing site, “free of boulders, free of cliffs, free of great slopes.”

The panel are all wearing special face masks with logos of the rover mission on them.

Nasa is now displaying images shot by craft orbiting Mars – not Percy the rover – of the rover’s landing.

The image is of Jezero crater. Here’s how the drama of landing is narrated:

“Of all of the things that had to go correctly for us to make it to this point... entry to the Martian atmosphere, right on time... the searing heat of entry and 11 Gs of force as we decelerated quickly... and we had steered our path through the atmosphere of Mars.”

Adam Steltzner, the chief engineer on the project, leads off.

He says the Rover is an “epic effort” that represents eight years and “over 4000 human years of investment.”

He calls the investment a gesture for humanity. Then he takes a walk down memory lane to the first moon landing.

And we’re off. Veronica McGregor, a NASA media officer, is introducing today’s event.

This video has some great footage of the parachute deployment prior to Perseverance’s landing, the touchdown and the reaction back home:

When we get started you can watch the proceedings in the video player atop the blog, now activated for live coverage.

In case it’s not already in your head...

The news conference and Q&A is anticipated to begin in about 15 minutes. We’ll have a live video stream right here in the live blog.

If you’re just catching up to coverage of yesterday’s momentous landing, read our science correspondent Natalie Grover’s coverage from Thursday:

Nasa’s science rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

Mission managers at Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory near Los Angeles burst into applause and cheers as radio signals confirmed that the six-wheeled rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zone inside Jezero crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.

The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293m miles (472m km) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000mph (19,000km/h) to begin its approach to touchdown on the planet’s surface.

The spacecraft’s self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of maoeuvres that Nasa dubbed “the seven minutes of terror” stands as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.

Read the full piece here:

Our picture editors put together a gallery of the best moments of Perseverance’s landing: