Ready to watch the post-landing press briefing! And taking full advantage of being at home so I can celebrate properly.
Briefing hasn't started yet, but it's extremely normal for the first post-landing briefing to be late. Give them a few minutes to get their image captions posted, folks corralled into safely distanced broadcast locations, etc. In due time.
It is now 2 full sols after @NASAPersevere landed, and still there are no raw images being posted at mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multi… . On every previous Mars mission since the MERs landed in 2004, these pages have given us all views of the daily operations of @NASA's Mars missions.
We were able to follow mission events by looking at the raw images feed. By now, @NASAPersevere should have deployed its high-gain antenna. Today is the day its mast should raise vertical, giving the Navcams, Mastcam-Z, and Supercam their first light on Mars.
The worst thing about @NASA@NASAJPL@NASA_Persevere's failure to follow Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity, and InSight and post raw images is that mission team members can't be excited in public about the great successes they're having. They've been silenced.
The worst thing is, I've heard nothing official. If an official @NASAPersevere person told me "there will be nothing posted until Monday" I would be upset, but at least I could leave my F5 key for the weekend. Don't you want me to be excited? Can you tell me either way?
To everybody replying to this with "maybe something has gone wrong" I suppose it's possible but I have a lot of friends in the mission and I keep their secrets but I think I'm not betraying anybody's confidence when I assure you all that I've heard of nothing being wrong.
Many others will be sharing photos this morning. I'm going to do something different: read through Maki et al. (2020), the paper describing Perseverance's engineering cameras, and provide you some context for those pictures. link.springer.com/article/10.100…
First: What and Where are the cameras? From left:
- 3 Parachute Uplook Cameras (PUC), mounted to backshell
- 1 Descent Downlook Camera (DDC), mounted to descent stage, pointing at rover
- 1 each Rover Uplook & Rover Downlook Camera, mounted to top & bottom of rover deck
- 2 Navcams, on mast, for surveying landscape for driving
- 6 Hazcams, on rover body, 4 front & 2 rear. Only 1 front pair is in use at a time (others are for redundancy), for surveying near field for drive safety & arm positioning
- 1 Cachecam inside rover body for sample images
Those of you waiting for Perseverance pics: I'm about to do y'all a service. I have a radio interview in 7 minutes. They will certainly arrive while I am busy doing that.
Jennifer Trosper: in 2 downlinks this pm, expect EDL up-looking camera movie thumbnails; Hazcams w/deployed lens covers; and maybe one EDL down-look full-res.
Rover is about 1 km to the SE of center of landing ellipse in a parking lot with rover tilted 1.2 degrees. Facing southeast at roughly 140 degrees. Power good; RTG was producing 105W before EDL. Battery state of charge 95%. Small ripple field separates rover from delta to NW.
Landing is 2km to SE of nearest part of delta, on the boundary between 2 rock units (good for geology): "mafic floor unit" and "olivine-bearing unit."