More than thirteen months after arriving on Mars, cameras on the Perseverance rover NASA they eventually detected parts of the Mars 2020 landing system that brought the rover to the ground.
The parachute and rear casing were photographed by MastCam-Z de Perseverance, seen in the distance just south of the rover’s current location. The image was taken on Sol 404, or on April 6, 2022 on Earth.
Normally, the rover would have taken a short sideways drive early in the mission to take images of the remains of the landing system.
But Perseverance he had to drive through dangerous terrain to reach a large area of Jezero Crater that the science team wanted to study, called South Séítah. That was close to the area where the parachute landed, and the rover eventually got there.
The parachute jettisoned during the landing sequence so that the lander Skycrane could lower the rover to the surface on its wheels.