A crisply rendered web application can show you where the agency’s Mars 2020 mission is right now as it makes its way to the Red Planet for a Feb. 18, 2021, landing.
The
last time we saw NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission was on July 30,
2020, as it disappeared into the black of deep space on a trajectory for Mars.
But with NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System, you can follow in real time as humanity’s
most sophisticated rover – and the Ingenuity
Mars Helicopter traveling with it – treks millions of miles
over the next six months to Jezero Crater.
“Eyes
on the Solar System visualizes the same trajectory data that the navigation
team uses to plot Perseverance’s course to Mars,” said Fernando Abilleira, the Mars 2020 mission design and navigation manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Southern California. “If you want to follow along with us on
our journey, that’s the place to be.”
Give the Mars 2020 Perseverance spacecraft a spin. Fully interactive, Eyes on the Solar System doesn’t just let you track it in real time as it travels to the Red Planet. Dozens of controls on pop-up menus allow you to customize not just what you see – from faraway to right “on board.” Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Eyes doesn’t
just let you see the distance between the Red Planet and the spacecraft at this
very moment. You can also fly formation with Mars 2020 or check the relative
velocity between Mars and Earth or, say, the dwarf planet Pluto.
“With
all our orbital assets circling Mars as well as Curiosity and InSight on its
surface, there is new data and imagery coming in all the time about the Red
Planet,” said Jon Nelson, visualization technology and applications development
supervisor at JPL. “Essentially, if you haven’t seen Mars lately through
Eyes on the Solar System, you haven’t seen Mars.”
Dozens
of controls on pop-up menus allow you to customize not just what you see – from
faraway to right “on board” a spacecraft – but also how you see it: Choose
the 3D mode, and all you need is a pair of red-cyan anaglyph glasses for a more
immersive experience.
You don’t have
to stop at Mars, either. You can travel throughout the solar system and even
through time. The website not only uses real-time data and imagery from NASA‘s
fleet of spacecraft, it’s also populated with NASA
data going back to 1950 and projected to 2050. Location, motion, and appearance
are based on predicted and reconstructed mission data.
While you’re exploring, take a deeper dive into our home
planet with Eyes on the Earth and
travel to distant worlds with Eyes on ExoPlanets.
More
About the Mission
Managed for
NASA by JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, the Mars 2020
Perseverance roveris part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as
a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with
returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human
presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration plans.
For more
information about the mission, go to:
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
For more
about NASA’s Moon to Mars plans, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/moon-to-mars
News Media Contact
DC Agle / Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011 / 818-393-2433
david.c.agle@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Alana Johnson / Grey Hautaluoma
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-672-4780 / 202-358-0668
alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov / grey.hautaluoma-1@nasa.gov
2020-164
Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory