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The photo provided by NASA shows the first image of the Martian surface sent by the "Perseverance" rover, shortly after landing in the Jezero crater
Photo: - / dpa
"Touchdown confirmed": The Mars rover "Perseverance" has landed on the red planet, said operations manager Swati Mohan on Thursday during the live stream of the US space agency Nasa.
Cheers broke out in the control center in Pasadena, California.
Shortly afterwards, a first, still quite coarse-grained black-and-white photo of the surface of Mars, taken by Perseverance, was published.
Nasa immediately posts the first picture of their rover on Twitter.
"Hello world," the US space agency says to its robot.
“My first look at my new forever home.” In the jubilation, the thought is probably pushed aside: A return flight for “Perseverance” is not planned.
The robot stays exactly where it landed - at the Jezero crater and in its immediate vicinity.
With a diameter of 45 kilometers, the crater is located in the northern hemisphere of Mars.
Scientists assume that a river flowed into a lake there around 3.5 billion years ago.
According to NASA scientist Ken Farley, Mars at the time "had a strong atmosphere, it had lakes and rivers on its surface, and it had habitable habitats in which organisms we now know about on earth could thrive."
For several years, the rover will collect rock and soil samples from the former delta of the river in the Jezero crater, along the former lake shore and finally at the crater rim, which will be brought to earth for analysis.
The collected samples could be brought to Earth during a joint mission planned by NASA and the European space agency Esa in the 2030s.
Even then, "Perseverance" will not be taken back.
It might sound a little melancholy when he speaks of his "forever home" after his arrival.
Icon: The mirror
oka / AFP
