Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2021

MARCH-APRIL 2021 T he first high-resolution, color image to be sent back by the Hazard Cameras (Hazcams) on the underside of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover after its landing. [NASA/JPL-Caltech] fore cutting ties and flying off to some safe distance. At a distance of 11 light minutes from Earth, such a precision landing could not be guided by humans from Mission Control. Instead, the delivery was the product of all of the associated hardware and, as explained by Deputy Project Manager Matt Wal- lace, about two million lines of code processing 30,000 control, sensor, and landing parameters. The Percy landing was, by all accounts, picture- perfect. While the superstitious might attribute this to the now-fa- mous NASA “lucky peanuts” seen being consumed by some on live feeds to ward off the ghosts of