Monthly Archives: February 2021

Controversial backbencher Craig Kelly quits Liberal Party to sit on the crossbench – ABC News

Posted: February 27, 2021 at 3:19 am

Controversial backbencher Craig Kelly has quit the Liberal Party.

Mr Kelly handed his letter of resignation to Prime Minister Scott Morrison during today's party room meeting.

He said he would sit on the crossbench but will continue to provide supply for the government meaning he will vote with the government on bills or legislation related to the budget.

He also said he would vote with the government on all policies that were taken to the last election.

Mr Kelly was recently criticised by the Prime Minister for pushing alternative therapies for COVID-19 and for spreading misinformation about vaccines on social media.

He said he did not want to be a distraction to the government and did not want Mr Morrison to have to keep answering questions about things he posted, instead of the messages he wanted to get across.

The move will mean the government will now have a one-seat majority in the House of Representatives, but will have to provide a speaker currently Tony Smith who oversees the chamber.

That means the government has 75 seats out of 151 sitting on its benches, one less than is needed for an outright majority.

Mr Kelly said the decision to quit the party was not easy, and was made "with a very heavy heart".

"I felt that for the rest of this parliamentary term, if I'm going to act and speak according to my conscience and beliefs, that I can do so more effectively as an independent," he said.

Shortly after quitting the Liberal Party, Mr Kelly was visited by One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts and Katter's Australian Party leader Bob Katter.

Mr Kelly confirmed he would run in the next election but ruled out joining a different party.

"My beliefs are still closely aligned with the Liberal Party," he said.

He said he had not given any thought to re-joining the Liberal Party if asked.

Mr Kelly said being dressed down by Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently did not lead to his decision to quit.

The controversial MP had to be spoken to more than once by Mr Morrison after repeatedly posting about unproven coronavirus treatments and questioning the safety of vaccines on his Facebook page.

The Prime Minister made it clear he expected the backbencher to follow and respect the health advice from officials.

Mr Morrison said "the government will continue to function" without Mr Kelly.

"[Craig and I] had a discussion a couple of weeks ago as you'll be aware," he said.

"I set out some very clear standards and he made some commitments that I expected to be followed through on.

"He no longer felt that he could meet those commitments, but I can tell you, my standards don't change."

The Prime Minister said he learned of Mr Kelly's resignation when he announced it to the party room.

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Liberals accuse Francois Legault’s CAQ government of not being able to deliver on its flagship promise – CTV News Montreal

Posted: at 3:19 am

QUEBEC CITY -- Liberal education critic Marwah Rizqy says CAQ Premier Francois Legault's flagship promise, which he put his seat at stake over, was only empty words.

The Liberal education spokesperson reacted Thursday to the Legault government's announcement that it will take two more years to create 2,600 kindergarten classes for four-year-olds.

She said that parents are the ones losing out, since the two ministers who represent them, Jean-Francois Roberge (Education) and Mathieu Lacombe (Family), were unable to deliver.

Kindergarten classes for four-year-olds is a new, non-compulsory program still being phased in across the province.

The CAQ's campaign platform included the opening of 5,000 preschool classes during its first mandate. This figure then fell to 3,400 and then to 2,600.

The Ministry of Education issued a brief news release Wednesday at 5 p.m. to announce that it "now plans to open all [kindergarten] classes [for four-year-olds] by 2025-2026."

The ministry says the delay is being caused by "availability of premises and manpower."

Meanwhile, construction cost estimates of have exploded. The average amount to create a new four-year-old kindergarten class, estimated at $120,000 during the election campaign, is now $800,000.

Rizqy said the facts caught up with the CAQ.

"They were in a world parallel to ours," she said. "They denied the shortage of teachers. Shortage of premises, they denied. Today, the facts are stubborn and catching up to them."

"Not only are there no places in four-year-old kindergartens, the waiting list in childcare centres has grown," she said. "The two ministers in family and in education have failed parents."

For months, Legault has maintained that the CAQ's promises will be fulfilled, even in spite of the pandemic.

On Jan. 28, Legault said his government "will still to be able to keep ... all the electoral promises we made during the 2018 campaign."

"So that means, among other things, in education, the development of four-year-old kindergartens, the addition of services for children with learning difficulties, the renovation of schools, [and] the construction of beautiful schools."

-- This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 25, 2021.

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Liberals accuse Francois Legault's CAQ government of not being able to deliver on its flagship promise - CTV News Montreal

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Victorian Liberals threaten to call in the PM over treachery claims – The Age

Posted: at 3:19 am

In a letter sent to the partys administrative committee, and seen by The Age, Mr Quick said he was considering asking Prime Minister Scott Morrison to personally intervene and sanction those involved.

The intra-party moderate group that includes Mr Clark and Mr Quick and dominates the Victorian Liberal Party is in an ongoing feud with the conservative faction, including the Treasurer and Health Minister along with Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar and former president Michael Kroger.

Health Minister Greg Hunt (left) has distanced himself from the internal ructions, which threaten to draw in Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The latest edition of Grassroots, which carried the accusations about Mr Clark and Mr Quick, also included words that mirrored an earlier press release from Mr Hunt spruiking the COVID-19 vaccine. That inclusion led some in the party to believe Mr Hunt had contributed to the newsletter but a spokesperson for Mr Hunt said he was unaware of the newsletter or its authors.

Mr Hunt faces being dragged into a messy legal stoush after Mr Quick wrote to the partys administrative committee, saying he was considering defamation action and calling on federal MPs to identify the anonymous authors.

While initiating legal action opens up a variety of digital discovery and subpoena options, there ... is a simpler way to find out who was involved, he wrote.

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A number of party members have written articles specifically for Grassroots, we simply need to ask them who they gave the articles to.

Mr Quick said he was considering asking Mr Morrison to intervene and potentially sanction those involved. He called on Mr Hunt and other MPs to explain their role, if any, in Grassroots.

I am currently considering sending a letter to the Prime Minister requesting him to do something about the behaviour of some Victorian Federal MPs, Mr Quick said in the email.

Mr Quick said the MPs could be sanctioned by the party for failing to assist in identifying the authors.

The factional feud comes as the state opposition attempts to reboot its political fortunes. Fresh from a three-day strategy meeting on the Mornington Peninsula, the Victorian Liberals have set up four campaign policy groups to focus on ideas before next years election.

A Victorian anti-corruption probe into developer John Woodman centres on his influence in political circles. Credit:Justin McManus

In a reversal from the 2018 election, the party is expected to move away from social policies and focus on jobs, the economy and improving liveability in Victoria after months of strict lockdowns in 2020.

The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) is investigating Mr Woodman over allegations he bribed councillors and sought to influence politicians through donations.

Late last year, The Age reported that Mr Frydenberg appeared at a fundraiser that was also attended by a close associate of the controversial developer, who was raided as part of the IBAC probe. The article also included a reference to Mr Hunt ordering a $5000 contribution to his election campaign from Lorraine Wreford, an associate of Mr Woodman, be sent to charity after IBAC launched its public hearings.

Our Morning Edition newsletter is a curated guide to the most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign uphere.

Paul is a Victorian political reporter for The Age.

Annika is state political editor for The Age.

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Victorian Liberals threaten to call in the PM over treachery claims - The Age

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Pankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past – The New Republic

Posted: at 3:19 am

Mishra insists that liberalism cannot so easily shed this baggage. The chaos, violence, and snarling ideologies of imperial rule in Africa, Asia, and Latin America fed directly into the wars that would dismember and reshape the world. Colonies, Mishra writes, were the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europes brutal twentieth-century warsracial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian liveswere first forged. The German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt recognized this in her 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she described how Europeans reordered humanity into master and slave races in ways that prefigured the decimation of the world wars and the Holocaust. But as Mishra points out, anti-colonial thinkers in Asia such as the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao and the Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose had already come to that conclusion decades before Arendt, keenly seeing how the Wests brutality overseas now consumed it in the inferno of World War I. The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure was systematically destroyed, and entire populations were eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies, Mishra writes. Europes equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.

That dynamic persisted into the Cold War, as the contest between the West and the Soviet Unionbetween the enlightened liberal world and the fallen authoritarian oneobscured the widespread violence perpetrated on behalf of liberalism in the twentieth century, in killing fields as varied as Indonesia, Congo, and Nicaragua. And it continuedeven acceleratedafter the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the United States embraced a far more militarized foreign policy, leading to nearly 200 military interventions since 1992 (the United States conducted around 50 military interventions between the end of World War II and 1991). Thanks to both education and cultural insularity, people in the West (and in the United States in particular) often struggle to see just how entangled they are in the world. The greatest contribution of Mishras work is its indefatigable insistence that places long considered marginal belong in the foreground of modern political history. He isnt just interested in righting the balance between the West and the rest; he questions whether one can even separate the two.

What distinguishes Mishras energetic and often pugilistic writing is not necessarily the point of its attackthe withering, if familiar, broadsides against the callous actions of Western powers and postcolonial statesbut rather its angle. Mishra sees the present as a historian; the tremors on the surface reveal deep currents. In an especially merciless piece on Brexit, for instance, he compares Britains departure from the European Union to the countrys retreat from empire and consequent loss of identity, showing how the ineptitude of colonial-era Britons abroad now defines the split from Europe. The malign incompetence of the Brexiteers, he writes, was precisely prefigured during Britains exit from India in 1947, most strikingly in the lack of orderly preparation for it. The same class of posh eternal schoolboys that crafted the disastrous partition of Indiaresulting in upwards of a million deathsnow aspired to cleave the country from Europe. Ordinary British people stand to suffer from the untreatable exit wounds once inflicted by Britains bumbling chumocrats on millions of Asians and Africans.

In other essays, Mishra reminds readers that The Economist supported the Confederacy in the nineteenth century and hailed the rise of Mussolini in the twentieth. (The magazine would also offer its backing to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.) And he recounts the bigotry that underlay the internationalism of President Woodrow Wilson (a legacy that recently saw the presidents name scrubbed from Princetons School of Public and International Affairs) as a harbinger for future interventions in the name of liberal values. The New Republic, Mishra notes acidly, described President George W. Bush in buoyant terms after U.S. troops entered Iraq as the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself.

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Fact check: Viral video doesn’t reveal sights, sounds of Mars from Perseverance rover – USA TODAY

Posted: at 3:17 am

The claim: Viral video shows Perseverance on Mars

NASA's newest robotic explorer, the Perseverance rover, touched down on the planet of Mars on Feb. 18, ending its300 million-mile journey from a Florida launch pad.

Following its landing, social media was flooded with news reports, videos and photographs of the rover and those involved in the NASA control room.

Among the onslaught ofposts expressingexcitement overthe rover's safe landing on the red planet were videos and photographsthat misrepresented or misidentified Perseverance and what it could see on Mars.

One exampleis this viral video,which includes a panoramic view and audio of Mars, with claims that the footage is from the Perseverance rover.

The caption reads, "Early video from NASA Perseverance, Mars. Stunning."

USA TODAY has reached out to the poster for comment.

The 26-second video includes audio and pans around the brown landscape.

This video is from Mars but is not footage from Perseverance. It is actually from the Curiosity rover, the title of whichis visible in the last few seconds of the video in the bottom left corner.

The footage from Curiosity, which looks like a video in this format,is actually a panoramic photograph from 2019,which can be seen here.

The sound in the video is alsonot genuine because the Perseverance rover will be the first rover to have microphones operating on Mars. NASA didn't release the first audio files until Feb. 22, and instances of this video claiming to be Perseverance started appearing on social media prior to that.

Previously, NASA hascaptured seismic vibrations from Mars, but it has not recorded sounds from the surface of the planet like the post claims.

The claim in the post has been rated FALSE. Neither the video nor the audiofootage in the Facebook post is from the Perseverance rover. The footage is actually a panoramic photograph from the Curiosity rover. Also, the sound in the video is not authentic.

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You cansubscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

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Fact check: Viral video doesn't reveal sights, sounds of Mars from Perseverance rover - USA TODAY

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‘Harbor Seal Rock’ on Mars and other new sights intrigue Perseverance rover scientists – Space.com

Posted: at 3:17 am

NASA's Perseverance rover has landed in a rich scientific hunting ground, if its first good look around is any guide.

The car-sized Perseverance landed on the floor of Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, kicking off an ambitious surface mission that will hunt for signs of ancient Mars life and collect samples for future return to Earth, among other tasks.

Perseverance is not yet ready to dive into that science work; the mission team is still conducting health and status checks on its various instruments and subsystems. But the six-wheeled robot recently used its Mastcam-Z camera suite to capture a high-definition, 360-degree panorama of its surroundings, and that first taste has the mission team intrigued.

Live updates: NASA's Perseverance Mars rover mission

For example, the zoomable panorama revealed a dark stone that the team has dubbed "Harbor Seal Rock," Mastcam-Z principal investigator Jim Bell, of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration, said during a webcast discussion of the photo on Thursday (Feb. 25).

The Martian wind probably carved Harbor Seal Rock into its curious shape over the eons, Bell said. He also pointed out patches that showed evidence of much faster-acting erosion spots where the thrusters on Perseverance's "sky crane" descent stage blew away Mars' blanket of red dust on Feb. 18, exposing the surfaces of small rocks.

One such patch harbors a group of light-colored, heavily pitted stones that have caught mission scientists' eyes.

"Are these volcanic rocks? Are these carbonate rocks? Are these something else? Do they have coatings on them?" Bell said. "We don't know we don't have any chemical data or mineral data on them yet but, boy, they're certainly interesting, and part of the story about what's going on here is going to be told when we get more detailed information on these rocks and some of the other materials in this area."

This is one of the key jobs of Mastcam-Z and Perseverance's other cameras, Bell said to spot interesting features that Perseverance can study in more detail with its spectrometers and other science instruments.

The 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater harbored a deep lake and a river delta billions of years ago. Deltas are good at preserving signs of life here on Earth, so the Perseverance team is eager for the rover to study and sample the remnants of that feature within Jezero. And the delta is visible in the Mastcam-Z panorama; the cliffs that mark its edge are about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) from Perseverance's landing site, Bell said.

The ridgeline that's visible beyond the delta cliffs in the Mastcam-Z panorama is Jezero Crater's rim, he added.

The recently unveiled photo is just the beginning, of course. For starters, it's the lowest-resolution panorama the Mastcam-Z team will construct. Bell said that similar shots that are three times sharper will be assembled after Perseverance switches over to its surface-optimized software, a four-day process that's already underway.

And we haven't gotten the slightest taste of Perseverance's science discoveries yet. That work will take a while to get going, because the mission team's first big task after getting the rover up and running is to conduct test flights of the 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, which rode to the Red Planet on Perseverance's belly.

Ingenuity's pioneering sorties the first rotorcraft flights on a world beyond Earth will likely take place this spring, and science and sampling are expected to begin in earnest in the summer, mission team members have said.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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'Harbor Seal Rock' on Mars and other new sights intrigue Perseverance rover scientists - Space.com

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NASA’s Perseverance Rover Gives High-Definition Panoramic View of Landing Site NASA’s Mars Exploration Program – NASA Mars Exploration

Posted: at 3:17 am

A 360-degree panorama taken by the rovers Mastcam-Z instrument will be discussed during a public video chat this Thursday.

NASAs Mars 2020 Perseverance rover got its first high-definition look around its new home in Jezero Crater on Feb. 21, after rotating its mast, or head, 360 degrees, allowing the rovers Mastcam-Z instrument to capture its first panorama after touching down on the Red Planet on Feb 18. It was the rovers second panorama ever, as the rovers Navigation Cameras, or Navcams, also located on the mast, captured a 360-degree view on Feb. 20.

Mastcam-Z is a dual-camera system equipped with a zoom function, allowing the cameras to zoom in, focus, and take high-definition video, as well as panoramic color and 3D images of the Martian surface. With this capability, the robotic astrobiologist can provide a detailed examination of both close and distant objects.

The cameras will help scientists assess the geologic history and atmospheric conditions of Jezero Crater and will assist in identifying rocks and sediment worthy of a closer look by the rovers other instruments. The cameras also will help the mission team determine which rocks the rover should sample and collect for eventual return to Earth in the future.

Stitched together from 142 images, the newly released panorama reveals the crater rim and cliff face of an ancient river delta in the distance. The camera system can reveal details as small as 0.1 to 0.2 inches (3 to 5 millimeters) across near the rover and 6.5 to 10 feet (2 to 3 meters) across in the distant slopes along the horizon.

The detailed composite image shows a Martian surface that appears similar to images captured by previous NASA rover missions.

Were nestled right in a sweet spot, where you can see different features similar in many ways to features found by Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity at their landing sites, said Jim Bell of Arizona State Universitys School of Earth and Space Exploration, the instruments principal investigator. ASU leads operations of the Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.

The camera team will discuss the new panorama during a question and answer session at 4 p.m. EST Thursday, Feb. 25, which will air live on NASA Television and the agencys website, and will livestream on the agencys Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Daily Motion, and YouTube channels, as well as the NASA app. Speakers include:

Mastcam-Zs design is an evolution of NASAs Curiosity Mars rovers Mastcam instrument, which has two cameras of fixed focal length rather than zoomable cameras. The two cameras on Perseverances Mastcam-Z dual cameras are mounted on the rovers mast at eye level for a person 6 feet, 6 inches (2 meters) tall. They sit 9.5 inches (24.1 centimeters) apart to provide stereo vision and can produce color images with a quality similar to that of a consumer digital HD camera.

The Mastcam-Z team includes dozens of scientists, engineers, operations specialists, managers, and students from a variety of institutions. In addition, the team includes deputy principal investigator Justin Maki of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

More About the Mission

A key objective of Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planets geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASAs Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance, go to:

https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance

and

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020

For more information about NASAs Mars missions, go to:

https://www.nasa.gov/mars

To see images as they come down from the rover and to vote on the favorite image of the week, go to:

https://go.nasa.gov/perseverance-raw-images

News Media Contacts

Alana Johnson / Grey HautaluomaNASA Headquarters, Washington202-672-4780 / 202-358-0668alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov / grey.hautaluoma-1@nasa.gov

Andrew GoodJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-393-2433andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

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NASA's Perseverance Rover Gives High-Definition Panoramic View of Landing Site NASA's Mars Exploration Program - NASA Mars Exploration

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NASA’s Perseverance rover watched as its sky crane crashed on Mars (photo) – Space.com

Posted: at 3:17 am

The Perseverance Mars rover's "sky crane" descent stage made the ultimate sacrifice last week, and we now have a photo to memorialize the flying robot's heroic death.

The rocket-powered sky crane lowered the car-sized Perseverance rover to the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater on cables last Thursday (Feb. 18), bringing the rover's harrowing "seven minutes of terror" entry, descent and landing (EDL) sequence to a successful end.

Just after the rover's wheels touched down, the sky crane flew off to crash-land intentionally a safe distance away and Perseverance snapped a photo of the impact's immediate aftermath, NASA announced Wednesday (Feb. 24).

Video: Perseverance spots sky crane's Mars impact plume after touchdownRelated: NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission in pictures

"A moment of respect for the descent stage. Within two minutes of safely delivering me to the surface of Mars, I caught the smoke plume on one of my Hazcams [hazard-avoidance cameras] from its intentional surface impact an act that protected me and the scientific integrity of my landing site," agency officials wrote via the mission's official Twitter account, @NASAPersevere.

Perseverance documented its EDL in unprecedented detail, capturing high-definition video with multiple cameras as it blazed through the Martian sky toward Jezero's floor. That epic video shows key events in the touchdown sequence, including the deployment of the mission's supersonic parachute and the moment the rover's six wheels hit the red dirt.

Other robotic eyes were watching on Thursday as well. For example, the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the Red Planet since 2006, snapped a photo of Perseverance gliding through the alien skies beneath its parachute. And a day later, HiRISE imaged mission hardware on the ground not just Perseverance, but also its sky crane, heat shield and parachute-backshell combo in their various resting spots within Jezero.

Perseverance is the centerpiece of the $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, which will hunt for signs of ancient life and collect and cache dozens of samples for eventual return to Earth. The rover is still going through its post-landing checkouts, but it has already begun imaging its surroundings in detail.

For instance, the mission team just released a high-definition, 360-degree panorama of the landing site stitched together from 142 images captured by Perseverance's Mastcam-Z camera system. The gorgeous photo provides our best look yet at Jezero Crater, which long ago harbored a river delta that spilled into a lake hundreds of feet deep.

We'll learn much more about this mysterious place after Perseverance gets fully up and running. So stay tuned!

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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NASA's Perseverance rover watched as its sky crane crashed on Mars (photo) - Space.com

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Mars rover beams back panoramic view of landing site – CBS News

Posted: at 3:17 am

The first high resolution panorama showing the Perseverance Mars rover's landing site provides a remarkably detailed view of Jezero Crater, including the jagged rim of the crater in the distance and low cliffs marking the edge of an ancient river delta.

The panorama is made up of 142 images captured by the Mastcam-Z camera instrument over the weekend, three days after the rover's dramatic landing.

Click on the image below to zoom in and explore the landscape.

The zoomable, dual camera system is mounted on a remote sensing mast and is capable of rotating a full 360 degrees to provide panoramic color and 3D images. It is capable of detecting something as small as a house fly across the length of a football field.

"I'm taking it all in," the rover's Twitter account reported Wednesday. "This is the first 360-degree view of my home using Mastcam-Z."

Perseverance landed last Thursday in a crater that once held a body of water the size of Lake Tahoe. Billions of years ago, water entered the crater through a channel cutting through the crater's rim, depositing sediments in a broad delta formation as it filled the crater to a depth of hundreds of feet.

The water vanished some three billion years ago, but the sediments might hold preserved remnants of ancient microbial life. Perseverance was designed to collect promising rock and soil samples that will be deposited on the surface for retrieval by another rover later this decade. The samples then will be launched into orbit for capture by a European spacecraft that will bring them back to Earth for detailed analysis.

The Mastcam-Z panorama looks out across the floor of the crater, showing Jezero's craggy rim in the distance and eroded cliffs marking the edge of the delta formation. Nearby scouring marks where rocket exhaust plumes hit the surface as Perseverance was being lowered to touchdown by its "sky crane" jet pack.

"We're nestled right in a sweet spot, where you can see different features similar in many ways to features found by (the earlier rovers) Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity at their landing sites," said principal investigator Jim Bell of Arizona State University. ASU operates Mastcam-Z in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.

One goal of the initial imaging campaign is to identify relatively flat, boulder-free areas where a small helicopter, still attached to the belly of the rover, can be dropped off for tests to determine if flight in the thin martian atmosphere is feasible.

Initial test flights are expected in about two months.

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Here’s what we know about planetary protection on China’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission – Space.com

Posted: at 3:17 am

This spring, China will attempt its first Mars landing. But in anticipation of that milestone, scientists are wondering whether the Tianwen-1 rover may carry Earthly contamination with it to the surface.

Because scientists have high hopes of someday discovering traces of life on Mars, spacecraft that will land on the planet are kept as immaculately free of Earthly life as possible. These days, that means a complicated cleaning procedure throughout the spacecraft's assembly and frequent testing for spores, an inactive form of bacteria that are particularly hardy.

NASA's Perseverance rover went through precisely that treatment before it left Earth in July for its journey to Mars. However, Congress bans NASA from communicating with its Chinese counterpart.

"I don't know anything beyond what all the rest of us know from the public releases of information, but they do participate," Lisa Pratt, NASA's planetary protection officer, told a virtual meeting of the committee leading the creation of a new decadal survey identifying the priorities of planetary scientists into the 2030s on Feb. 11.

Related: China's Tianwen-1 Mars mission in photos

If the Tianwen-1 mission successfully touches down on Mars, China will become only the second country to operate a spacecraft on the Red Planet's surface, joining NASA. (The Soviet Union and the European Space Agency have had spacecraft on the surface, but these missions either crashed or failed in less than a minute.)

Like the U.S., China is party to the Outer Space Treaty, established in 1967, which outlines what nations can and cannot do in outer space yes to working for all humanity, no to nuclear weapons, for example. One tenet of the Outer Space Treaty refers to planetary protection, stating that countries must explore other worlds "so as to avoid their harmful contamination."

There are a few reasons to be wary of bringing terrestrial bugs to other worlds. For one, scientists don't want any Earth creatures to be able to make a home for themselves on Mars; for another, scientists want to be confident that if they detect traces of life on Mars, that sign is indeed from Mars, not some wayward fingerprint that came from Earth.

According to previous reporting by Space.com, Tianwen-1 is targeting a landing in Utopia Planitia, at a site where there's no evidence of water ice near the surface. (When it comes to planetary protection, sites with water are always scientists' top concern.) Long ago, however, there may have been ancient groundwater deep below the surface and mudflows in Tianwen-1's landing zone.

NASA's Viking 2 and InSight landers both touched down elsewhere in this same region. The twin Viking landers were the first spacecraft that NASA engineers sampled before departure, archiving organic and biological material from them so that if instruments detected a potential signal of life, scientists could compare such data to the samples remaining on Earth.

Launched in the 1970s, the Viking mission still predated NASA's earnest planetary protection standards for Mars. But InSight landed in 2018 and was required to meet specific standards before launch of just how dirty the spacecraft could be, with engineers searching for and tallying exposed surfaces in the spacecraft for spores.

Spore-counting is a standard NASA would like to move away from, as it turns out, but potential future techniques, including those relying on genetic analysis, aren't ready yet, Pratt said. So spores it is. And China is likely in the same place, Pratt said, noting that Chinese scientists do have contacts with a key Italian planetary protection team, so should be aware of current standards.

However, while NASA and its Chinese counterpart can't interact directly, sometimes their representatives end up at the same meetings, and Pratt told the story of just such an occasion, which she attributed to November, when she ended up seated next to a Chinese scientists.

"I asked a question in front of everybody, I said, 'Can you talk to us about what you did for planetary protection compliance?'" Pratt told the committee. "And the individual sort of said, 'We did what all the rest of you do, we did the spore metric measurements, and we were highly compliant.'"

NASA, however, hasn't seen those measurements and may never.

"They at least said the right thing. Needless to say, there is no inspection, no external verification," Pratt said. "At the moment, my thought is, 'OK, I'm taking their word for it,' because I don't have any way to know otherwise."

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Here's what we know about planetary protection on China's Tianwen-1 Mars mission - Space.com

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