Tuesday marks NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover’s hundredth Martian day on the red planet.
The car-sized, 2,260-pound spacecraft landed on Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, after a 203-day journey traversing 293 million miles.
MARS HELICOPTER INGENUITY EXPERIENCES ANOMALY ON 6TH FLIGHT, LANDS SAFELY ANYWAY
Perseverance, the most technologically advanced space robot the agency has sent to date, was designed based on the Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover configuration.
Packed with groundbreaking engineering, the rover carried the Mars Ingenuity Helicopter to the planet ahead of its historic experimental flights and the first-ever powered, controlled flight on another planet.It also took unprecedented images, video and audio recordings, including selfies with Ingenuity and the sound of Martian winds.
Perseverance, led by members of the agency’s Southern California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has since embarked on its trek in a mission to conduct astrobiological research including the search for ancient microbial life.
In a tweet acknowledging the milestone, JPL’s Perseverance team wrote that the rover had tested all cameras and scientific instruments, returned more than 75,000 pictures including the documentation of Ingenuity’s flights, extracted oxygen from Mars’ atmosphere and since headed south to its first exploration zone.
In April, the rover’s MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization
