Currently there are 6 rovers in Mars, but only three of them active. The active rovers include Curiosity, Perseverance, and Zhurong (with Zhurong being the most recent rover to land – doing so on 15th May 2021). Humans have yet to land on Mars, and the rover lets scientists run experiments, such as testing soil and rock samples for evidence of liquid water, or chemicals that could point to signs of life.
Perseverance Rover landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. The whole of the landing was streamed live via NASA's YouTube channel, and the rover was later able to send back high definition footage from the final moments of its descent.
From the deploying of the parachute to the final 'sky crane' assisted touchdown, check out the video of Perseverance landing on Mars below.
Before showing you the pictures, let us take a minute to explain what is a Martian sol. Below the pictures taken in the red planet, you are likely to see this word attached to the photo followed by a number.
Sol (borrowed from the Latin word for sun) is a Solar Day on Mars that is, a Mars-day. A sol is the apparent interval between two successive returns of the Sun to the same meridian (sundial time) as seen by an observer on Mars. It is one of several units for timekeeping on Mars
A sol is slightly longer than an Earth day. It is approximately 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds long. A Martian year is approximately 668 sols, equivalent to approximately 687 Earth days or 1.88 Earth years.
The sol was originally adopted in 1976 during the Viking Lander Missions and is a measure of time mainly used by NASA when, for example, scheduling the use of the Mars Rover.
Perseverance on Sol 369 captured these incredible pictures of the Martian surface.
These images are composed togathere from individual raw footage. They are taken on March 4th, 2022 by Perseverance rover and composed by Neville Thompson
