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NASA: Aug. 21, 2020
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 30. NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System tool lets you track the spacecraft in real time as it makes its way to Mars for a Feb. 18, 2021, landing.
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Follow NASA’s Perseverance rover in real time on its way to Mars
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.”
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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.”
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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 rover is 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
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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
(Last Updated: Aug. 21, 2020)
Editor: Tony Greicius
Tags: Astrobiology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mars, Mars Perseverance Rover, Moon to Mars