New Mars Photos Show Perseverance Creating A Lonely Martian Road

Perseverance has shared countless photos of its Mars journies over the year, and with its latest upload, the NASA rover offers a gorgeous update on its latest travels. Looking back at 2021, the past year has been an exciting one for the space and science communities. The James Webb Space Telescope finally launched, a NASA probe flew through the Sun’s outer atmosphere for the first time, and hundreds of new exoplanets were discovered — further expanding our understanding of the universe.

Another milestone this year saw the Perseverance rover landing on Mars. It arrived on the Red Planet in February with its Ingenuity companion. In the months since then, Perseverance has been exploring the Martian surface, collecting rock samples, and capturing hundreds of thousands of photos along the way.

NASA received a new batch of Perseverance photos on December 27, and in typical Perseverance fashion, they offer an incredible look at what the rover is up to. The photo above reveals a stunning view of Mars’ yellow sky, sandy ground, and various rocks scattered about. Part of Perseverance’s body is visible towards the bottom of the image, as are marks in the ground made by the rover’s wheels. Pictures like this are always a bit sobering. Perseverance is constantly finding new things on Mars and sharing important mission updates. At the end of the day, however, it’s a lonely rover that keeps company with rocks, sand, and its own impressions in the ground below it.

Another View Of Mars’ Haunting Beauty

The second picture was uploaded less than a minute later and offers a slightly different view of the same scene. Perseverance is no longer visible, though it manages to capture an even better view of the planet it’s traversing. Here, the rover spots more rocks, a more expansive sky, and giant dunes way off in the distance. Perseverance has shared a few photos similar to this over the year, and they never cease to impress.

These latest photos further add to an incredibly busy year for NASA’s Martian rover. In just a few short months, Perseverance has traversed the Martian landscape with its autopilot system, collected multiple samples, confirmed the existence of a lake in the Jezero Crater, and found an abundance of strange-looking rocks. And that was all done in less than a year. 2022 should be even bigger for Perseverance — allowing it to collect more Mars rocks and take more awe-inspiring photos. What it’ll find in the months ahead is unclear, but whatever it is, the world will be watching.

Source: NASA (1), (2)

About The Author

Joe Maring
(1516 Articles Published)

Joe has been actively writing and talking about consumer tech since 2012. His biggest passion lies with smartphones, but he’s happy to talk your ear off about just about anything with a CPU. He lives in Kalamazoo, MI with his wife, two cats, and pit bull/boxer mix.

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