The Perseverance Mars rover is navigating its initial box and activation, pulling back about 7,000 photos to date, untying the seven-foot-long robot arm and performing a short test after a major software update after the ‘landing, engineers said Friday.
Robert Hogg, deputy mission manager for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the $ 2.4 billion rover’s scientific instruments have been tested, along with a set of weather sensors to monitor the difficulties of the ‘around the robot.
“Everything is going very well on our last mission to Mars,” he said. “Perseverance has been doing an exceptional job during its first two weeks on the red planet … I am delighted to report that yesterday afternoon we made our first trip to Mars.”
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The one-ton rover made a short 13-foot run, made a 150-degree left turn, and then retreated about eight feet.
“Our first trip went incredibly well,” said Anais Zarifian, Perseverance mobility test bench engineer. It showed a sharp photo taken by one of the rover’s 25 cameras showing tire tracks in Martian land.
“You can see the wheels we left on Mars,” he told reporters. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier watching wheelbarrows and I’ve seen a lot of them. That’s just a huge milestone.”
Like the Curiosity rover that landed in another crater on Mars in 2012, perseverance moves at a top speed of just 0.1 mph. But thanks to improvements to its improved navigation software and its set of cameras, “we can actually drive five times faster than Curiosity and we’re able to average an average of about 200 meters a day,” Zarifian said.
Perseverance fell to the ground in Jezero Crater on February 18 at a site now known as Octavia E. Butler Landing, named in honor of the late African-American science fiction writer and native of Pasadena.
Project assistant scientist Katie Stack Morgan announced the honor, saying Butler’s protagonists “embodied determination and inventiveness, making her a perfect fit for the Perseverance rover’s mission.”
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The rover’s landing was orchestrated by software designed to meet the challenges of the long seven-month cruise on Mars and then the seven-minute descent to the surface. Once down, the engineers faced the somewhat daunting task of removing software that was no longer needed and loading the programming that would be used for the surface science mission.
The software update took a few days to complete.
“This is the software that really unleashes all the capabilities that Perseverance has available for our superficial mission,” Hogg said. “It has about 16 megabytes, very small. But when it works, it has 140 tasks, all executed on the rover’s computer at once.
“When we did this update, we had to be very careful not to have any major issues because, as you know, there is no helpline to call or any way to go to the rover and press the big button they were very careful and getting it was a great relief for the team. “
Scientists are studying initial images to determine the best path from the landing site to the relatively nearby cliffs that mark the eroded edge of an ancient delta where a now-defunct river flowed into Jezero, possibly depositing remnants of microbial life. past.
The rover’s telephoto sights show layered, weather-resistant deposits, similar in appearance to Earth’s shales, which often retain organic carbon and other “biosignatures.”
Two potential routes to the delta have been identified, but the scientific team has not yet selected the optimal route or identified a suitable area for test flights of an $ 80 million experimental drone still connected to the rover’s belly. .
NASA / JPL-Caltech
“Two weeks after the mission, we received some 7,000 images from the rover’s cameras, including first views of some of the geological exploration targets that brought the rover to Jezero,” Morgan said. “We are now working with engineers to determine which path is the most efficient, safest and most scientifically interesting.”
“And then we’ll get to the front of the delta. From there we’ll go exploring the delta, finally ending at the mouth of the river that entered Jezero, where we’ll probably deposit our first deposit sample,” Morgan added.
Perseverance is the first mission to Mars specifically designed to look for evidence of past microbial life. It is equipped with a complex system to collect promising soil and rock samples and deposit them on the surface for eventual recovery and return to Earth using a combination of NASA and European Space Agency spacecraft.
On Thursday, NASA announced a contract with Northrop Grumman, worth up to $ 84.5 million, to begin work on the propulsion system needed to launch the recovered samples into Mars orbit after their recovery. by another NASA rover. The European Space Agency is designing a spacecraft to capture samples by the end of the decade and return them to Earth for detailed laboratory analysis.
“This is one of the ages of JPL and NASA,” Hogg said. “While it seems like a long time to go, it will pass in the blink of an eye, when we get these (samples) back to Earth for scientists around the world to analyze.”