NASA Unveils Never-Before-Seen Video from Mars Rover Landing
CAPE CANAVERAL (CBS News) -- After a long weekend without any updates or imagery from the Perseverance Mars rover, NASA released a spectacular bounty of video Monday, including never-before-seen footage capturing the hair-raising descent to the surface of the red planet.
While previous landers captured still images during descent that later were stitched together to form a sort of stop-action movie, Perseverance was equipped with "ruggedized" off-the-shelf video cameras to shoot high-resolution imagery of the rover's plunge to landing on the floor of Jezero Crater.
Over the weekend, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where Perseverance was built, downlinked 30 gigabytes of data from the rover, including 23,000 images and video frames. That allowed them to give the public a bird's eye view of a landing on Mars.
