Ok, so this little space Tumblr sort of went dormant in January 2019, on account of *gestures wildly at everything*. But NASA's Perseverance rover lands on Mars tomorrow, with 23(!) cameras and two microphones on board, so I figured this would be a good time to dust it off for a while, at least. The video above is the traditional NASA media event they do before most major launches and landings. I usually skip the media questions part of these; doing that cuts the runtime to around 33 minutes instead of an hour, in case you're in a hurry or whatever.
If the video isn't detailed enough, here's a little light reading to tide everyone over until tomorrow:
A paper about the rover's many engineering cameras. The TL;DR there is that 1) landing videos will be from several angles this time: Looking down from the rover, looking up at the parachutes, looking down at the rover from the skycrane stage, etc. Assuming the landing goes well, obviously. And 2) navigation cameras are color this time, for the practical reason that you can't tell how dusty your rover is with greyscale photos.
The rover's eoPortal entry ended up being so detailed they split a couple of sub-pages off of it.
A paper on how you go about choosing a place to land on Mars. Which is not trivial when your project team includes hundreds of scientists across the globe, most of whom have important, strongly-held professional opinions about exactly where and where not to go. Along with hundreds of engineers trying to explain why various things the science folks want are either risky or impossible. TL;DR: There were meetings. Many, many, many meetings. (doc is 87 pages.)
