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How close was the rover to its intended landing spot?


It landed quite close to the centre of its landing ellipse, which was significantly smaller than the landing zones of previous missions.

Perhaps most impressive is the success of the terrain relative navigation. During descent a specific landing site was chosen, after going through atmospheric entry. That site had to be reachable based on where they ended up after entry, needed to be safe to land in, and should land as close as reasonable to scientifically interesting sites. The system chose a pixel from the initial images taken during descent, and the final landing was within 5m of that spot.


Nailed it - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/avoiding-hazards-at-jezero-c...

(A little more complicated than that of course. If I understand correctly, anything in blue was a candidate landing spot that it was free to select from. I'm pretty sure the header image is an artistic crop :) )


It was almost that good. It had a five-mile-wide ellipse to search, and found a spot close to the middle. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/371/6532/870/F1.l... If you have a Science magazine subscription, the image is from this article: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/870?rss=1/sh...




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