On February 18th, NASA successfully landed the Perseverance Rover on Mars. This is not the first Mars mission, but it was the first time that the entry, descent, and landing of a spacecraft was filmed and broadcast live for the public to watch. 6 FLIR machine vision cameras captured the event from multiple angles, documenting all stages of the touchdown. Although it is only a few minutes long, the footage has already helped engineers evaluate how well the Rover performed in space, and inspired millions of viewers around the world.
The Mars landing of NASA’s Perseverance Rover was captured on video by machine vision cameras. [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech]
There is a lot going on in those few minutes. The footage shows the parachute deploy after the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere and is about 11 kilometres from the surface of the planet. Just before this point, three up-looking cameras began recording, capturing footage of the supersonic deployment of the biggest parachute ever sent to space.
About 10 kilometres off the ground, the heat shield (used to protect the Rover during entry into the Martian atmosphere) drops off and exposes the Rover down-look camera, showing some of the Rover’s intense ride to Mars’ Jezero Crater.
Then the Rover drops away from the back shell (and parachute). From there its descent is managed by a rocket-powered descent stage called the SkyCrane.
Touchdown! This view, from a camera on the Rover, shows the SkyCrane being swept away as the Rover touches down on the surface of Mars to begin its mission.
The cameras that captured this footage are FLIR RGB machine vision cameras, and include five 1.3-megapixel cameras and one 3.1-megapixel USB camera.
“Our cameras are designed for operation on Earth, and not built to operate in outer space,” said Sadiq Panjwani, VP of the Integrated Imaging Solutions (IIS) division at FLIR. “We were quite thrilled that NASA put them to the test.”
NASA first contacted FLIR in 2015 to investigate suitable cameras for the EDL (entry, descent landing) system. Engineers were looking for commercial off-the-shelf hardware with an emphasis on low cost and ease of system integration. This is the first time that FLIR machine vision cameras have been subjected to the extreme temperatures and high gravity forces experienced during the Mars landing. Everyone involved in engineering and manufacture of cameras at FLIR is delighted about this testament to their durability and performance, and to say that their work has made it to Mars!
