Video shows Perseverance rover`s dramatic Mars landing.

Nasa has released stunning video of its Perseverance rover landing on Mars.

The movies cover the final minutes of last week`s hair-raising descent, up to the point where the robot`s wheels make contact with the ground.

The sequence shows a whirl of dust and grit being kicked up as the vehicle is lowered by its rocket backpack to the floor of Jezero Crater.

Perseverance was sent to Mars festooned with cameras, seven of which were dedicated to recording the landing.

Their imagery represents vital feedback for engineers as they look to improve still further the technologies used to put probes on the surface of the Red planet.

"We will learn something by looking at the performance of the vehicle in these videos. But a lot of it is also to bring you along on our journey," said Mike Watkins, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which is home to Nasa`s Mars mission control.

All the cameras employed in the descent and landing were off-the-shelf, ruggedised sports cameras, with next-to-no modifications.

Engineers at JPL continue the work of commissioning the robot.

At the weekend, Perseverance`s navigation mast, which had been stowed flat since leaving Earth last year, was raised into the vertical.

This allowed the main science cameras at the mast`s top, the Mastcam-Z system, to begin building a panorama of the surrounding terrain in Jezero and of the deck of the rover itself. The latter mosaic is wanted to look for any damage that might have been inflicted by flying stones at the time of landing.

Controllers will this week perform the critical task of transitioning Perseverance away from the software that got it safely down to the surface of Mars to one that enables the robot to rove and use equipment such as its robotic arm.

This is likely to take four Martian days, or Sols (a Martian day lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes). We might see the first test drive of a few metres come the weekend.

There`s huge interest in the mini-helicopter that travelled with the rover. The 2kg device will perform the first powered flight on another world.

But first Perseverance needs to find the right place to put this aircraft down to conduct its experiments. Mission planners said on Friday it would be a few weeks yet before the robot reached this chosen location, meaning it`s probably going to be April before Ingenuity, as the little chopper is known, takes to the skies.

Perseverance`s landing spot is in a 1.2km by 1.2km quadrangle that the science team has informally called Canyon de Chelly after the National Monument in the US State of Arizona.

The robot is sitting on a flat piece of ground at the boundary of two geologic units - a smooth unit under the wheels of the vehicle that contains what are likely to be dark volcanic rocks; and a rougher unit that has rocks with a lot of the mineral olivine in them.

About 2km to the northwest is what looks from satellite images to be the remains of a delta that formed when Jezero was filled by a giant lake billions of years ago.

Deltas are created when rivers enter a wider body of water and dump silt and sand. It`s in these sediments that Perseverance will look for signs of past microbial activity.

Publication Date: 2021-02-22

Source: By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent