CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP): NASA’s new Mars rover hit red road dust this week, putting 21 feet on the odometer in its first driving test.
The Perseverance rover ventured into its landing position on Thursday, two weeks after landing on the red planet to look for signs of past life.
The roundabout, round trip, lasted only 33 minutes and went so well that there was more driving on Friday and Saturday for the six-wheeled rover.
“This is really the start of our journey here,” said Rich Rieber, the NASA engineer who mapped out the route. “It will be like the Odyssey, adventures along the way, hopefully there will be no Cyclops, and I’m sure there will be stories written about it.”
In his first drive, Perseverance advanced 13 feet, made a 150-degree left turn, and then retreated 8 feet. During a press conference Friday, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shared photos of its tracks around and around small rocks.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see wheelways and I’ve seen a lot of them,” said engineer Anais Zarifian.
Flight controllers continue to check all Perseverance systems. So far everything looks good. The rover’s 7-foot robot arm, for example, flexed its muscles for the first time on Tuesday.
Before the car-sized rover can head to an ancient river delta to pick up rocks to eventually return to Earth, it must drop its so-called protective “belly” and release an experimental helicopter called Ingenuity.
It turns out that Perseverance landed on the edge of a possible helicopter runway, a flat, pleasant place, according to Rieber. So the plan is to get off this runway, leave the frying pan, and return to the long-awaited test flight of Ingenuity. All this should be achieved by the end of spring.
Scientists are debating whether to take the smoother route to reach the nearby delta or a possibly harder way with intriguing remnants of that time that was once watery, between 3,000 and 4,000 million years ago.
Perseverance, NASA’s largest and most elaborate rover to date, became the ninth American spacecraft to successfully land on Mars on February 18th. China hopes to land its smallest rover, which currently orbits the red planet, in a few more months.
Meanwhile, NASA scientists announced Friday that they named the Perseverance contact site after the late science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who grew up with JPL in Pasadena. She was one of the first African Americans to receive majority attention for science fiction. His works included “Bloodchild and Other Stories” and “Parable of the Sow”.
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