NASA's Perseverance rover beams back spectacular new images

The high-resolution still was extracted from a video taken by the descent stage of the spacecraft that had transported the rover from Earth.

At that moment, the descent stage was using its six-engined jetpack to slow to a speed of about 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) per hour as part of the "skycrane maneuver," the final phase of landing.

"You can see the dust kicked up by the rover's engines," said Adam Steltzner, Perseverance's chief engineer, who estimated the shot was taken about two meters (six feet) or so above the ground.

The three straight lines are mechanical bridles holding the rover underneath the descent stage, while the curly cable was used to transmit the data from the cameras to Perseverance.

When the rover touched down, it cut the 21 foot-long (6.4 meter-long) cables, allowing the descent stage to fly away for its own safe landing.

Another new image, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, captures Perseverance as it was parachuting down through the atmosphere at hundreds of miles an hour.

Perseverance has also been able to upload its first high-resolution, color photo showing the flat region it landed on in the Jezero Crater, where a river and deep lake existed billions of years ago.

A second color image shows one of the rover's six wheels, with several honeycombed rocks thought to be more than 3.6 billion years old lying next to it.

Volcanic rocks in particular can be dated with very high precision once the samples are brought back to Earth on a future return mission -- an exciting development from a planetary science perspective.

The first two images were released on Thursday shortly after the rover landed, but they were lower resolution and in black-and-white because of the limited data rate available.

NASA hopes to have more high resolution photos and videos in the coming days, but doesn't know yet if it has successfully recorded sound on Mars for the first time using microphones.