Watch NASA’s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HD

Then, a whirlwind of dust, as the descent stage fires its engines and lowers the rover onto the surface with cables.

NASA also released a slip of sound recorded on the Red Planet, a small whoosh — a gust of wind traveling at five meters per second, or about 11 miles per hour, NASA estimated.

The sounds and the video “are the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science mission directorate.

Documenting the landing, one of the most perilous parts of the mission, known as the “seven minutes of terror,” was not central to the spacecraft’s primary goal of searching for signs of ancient, microbial life on Mars.

But it was a way to inspire future generations of explorers, NASA said, as well as give engineers feedback on how the spacecraft operated.

“We have taken everyone along with us on our journeys across the solar system to the rings of Saturn, looking back at the pale blue dot and incredible panoramas on the surface of Mars,” said Michael Watkins, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This is the first time we’ve been able to actually capture an event like the landing of a spacecraft on Mars. And these are pretty cool videos. And we will learn something, by looking at the performance of the vehicle in these videos, but a lot of it is also to bring you along on our journey.”

Because the atmospheric conditions are so different on Mars, NASA’s engineers can’t test the landing systems on Earth. “So this is the first time we’ve had a chance as engineers to actually see what we designed,” said Matt Wallace, the deputy project manager. “It’s hard for me to express just how emotional and how exciting it was for everybody.”

NASA had put together compelling animations of the landing that showed the spacecraft hurtling through the Martian atmosphere, then deploying its parachute and finally skycrane lowering the rover to the surface. In 2012, it stitched together 297 small images taken during the last 2½ minutes of the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars. Curiosity also has sent back photos it has taken of itself on Mars’s barren landscape.

But those pale in comparison to what NASA released Monday.

Video coverage has long been part of space travel. But with today’s technology, NASA and the growing commercial space sector are giving space exploration a Hollywood-like feel that is a giant leap from the flickering grainy black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon five decades ago.

For its next human lunar exploration mission, called Artemis, NASA is looking for a vast improvement: footage that will bring people along for the ride inside the capsule as well as on the surface.

It has put out a solicitation to partners “who will use innovative technologies, imagery applications and approaches” so that the “public can experience different segments” of the missions, including “ ‘riding along’ with the crew in Orion on their journey to the area around the Moon; visual exploration of the lunar surface; and on the return to Earth.”

The space agency is looking to use everything from 360-degree cameras, virtual reality, 4K and ultra high-definition cameras, “robotic ‘third-person’ views” and other concepts that would deliver “a uniquely-engaging spaceflight experience.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been especially adept at using compelling video to tell the story of its journey — both the successes and failures. Videos posted to its YouTube channel have millions of views, helping it build an enormous fan base, which regularly tunes in to launches in a way not seen since the early days of the Space Age.

Its videos have showcased major milestones, such as NASA’s first human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the space shuttle fleet was retired, the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the landings of first-stage boosters, even how it catches the fairings, or nose cones, of its rockets on boats with giant nets like a center fielder nabbing a pop fly.

Its videos of the flights of its Starship prototypes are enormously popular. They showcase not only the short test flights of the Starship spacecraft that Musk says will ultimately take people to the moon and Mars, but its crash landings that end in fireballs as the company figures out how best to get them back to Earth safely.

It even put together a compilation video from the early days of its Falcon 9 rocket test landings, when they too often ended up exploding as they came crashing to the ground. That video, “How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster,” set to the marching band tune used in Monty Python’s “Flying Circus,” had 25 million views.

NASA and SpaceX even won an Emmy in 2019 for their joint broadcast of a test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.

The cameras are commercially available and were purchased by NASA from FLIR Systems, which has its corporate headquarters in Arlington, Va. “Our cameras are designed for operation on Earth, and not built to operate in outer space,” said Sadiq Panjwani, a vice president at the company. They had never been subjected to the extreme temperatures on Mars, or the high gravity forces the spacecraft experiences or heat it is exposed to while landing.

“So we were quite thrilled that NASA put them to the test,” he said.

The video of the Perseverance landing gave engineers valuable feedback that showed, for the most part, the systems worked perfectly. But the footage showed there was a problem with one of the springs that helps jettison the heat shield.

“There’s no danger to the spacecraft here, but it’s something we didn’t expect and something we wouldn’t have seen if we didn’t have this camera system to show us what was going on,” said Al Chen, NASA’s lead engineer for the entry, descent and landing systems.

The footage will be studied by scientists and engineers for years, NASA officials said. The parachute deployment will help scientists understand the atmosphere, the way the dust and gravel scattered during the landing could hold clues to the Martian landscape.

“To watch that video today was super emotional,” said Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum and a former NASA chief scientist. “To be able to watch a spacecraft land on another planet is stunning. It’s such an achievement.”