One of the most significant achievements in space exploration in recent years is the landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. Perseverance made a successful landing on the Red Planet a few days ago after an extremely painful journey through the thin and sparse Martian atmosphere. One of the critical pieces of the puzzle of Perseverance's safe landing was the descent stage.
The descent stage of the rocket is the rocket-powered portion that deploys after the parachute. The rover slowly descended from the descent stage via cables to the surface of Mars. Without the descent stage, Perseverance would have impacted the surface very harshly and likely would have suffered catastrophic damage to both it and the planet. The descent stage was not designed to land safely, and once it deployed the rover on the planet's surface, it flew off into space and self-destructed, ending its mission.
NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover has provided a new image from the Red Planet, showing smoke created by the descent stage that made a surface impact with the planet Mars. One of the rover's Hazcams captured the image, Perseverance tweeted Wednesday.
NASA released an image of the crash site, shown above, in false color.
This isn't the first time NASA has intentionally crashed a descent stage on the Martian surface a safe distance from one of its rovers. The rocket-powered sky crane that delivered the Curiosity rover to Mars on August 5, 2012, also flew away and crashed on the surface.
Here you can see video of the rover landing on the rocky planet. Perseverance has already sent back audio from Mars and shown a panoramic image from the red planet.
Perseverance is ready to search for signs of ancient microbial life, collect dust and rock samples and send them back to Earth where the climate and geology of the planet Mars will be studied.
Information source: slashgear.com
