The perseverance rover can travel 200 meters a day, but scientists must perform tests and safety checks before it can be further advanced.
Perseverance, NASA’s Mars explorer, has traveled its first short unit to the surface of the red planet, two weeks after the scientific robot’s perfect attack on the ground of a huge crater, mission officials said on Friday. .
The Perseverance rover ventured for the first time from its landing position on Thursday, two weeks after landing on the red planet to look for signs of past life.
Taking directions from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) mission managers near Los Angeles, the rover rolled four meters (13.1 feet) forward, turned about 150 degrees to its left, and then drive back another 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) for a total of 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) during the half-hour test at Jezero Crater, site of an ancient missing lake bed and delta from the river to Mars.
“It went incredibly well,” Anais Zarifian, JPL’s mobility testing engineer for Perseverance, said during a news conference call with reporters, which he considered a “huge milestone” for the mission.
The roundabout, round trip, lasted just 33 minutes and went so well that the six-wheeled rover was back in motion on Friday.
Perseverance is able to do an average of 200 meters of driving a day.
The surface of Mars directly below NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover is seen using the Rover Down-Look camera in an image acquired on February 22, 2021 [File: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Reuters]
NASA showed a photo taken by the rover showing the tread marks of the wheels left on the reddish, sandy Martian ground after its first driving.
Another vivid image of the surrounding landscape shows rugged, reddish terrain full of large, dark pebbles in the foreground and a high outcrop of distantly stratified rock deposits, marking the edge of the river delta.
I’m on the move! I just did my first driving test on Mars, covering about 5 meters. You are seeing the beginning of my wheels. Many more to do. pic.twitter.com/7tFIwWFfJ4
– NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) March 5, 2021
So far, Perseverance and its hardware, including the robot’s main arm, appear to be working perfectly, according to Robert Hogg, deputy mission manager.
But JPL engineers still have additional equipment controls to run on the rover’s numerous instruments before they are ready to send the robot on a more ambitious journey as part of its main mission to search for traces of fossilized microbial life. .
The team has yet to perform post-landing tests of the rover’s sophisticated system for drilling and collecting rock samples to return to Earth through future missions to Mars.
The cover of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, with the Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry, one of the instruments on the outstretched arm, is seen in an image taken by the rover’s navigation cameras on February 20, 2021. [File: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Reuters]
As soon as the perseverance check system is completed, the rover will head to an ancient river delta to collect rocks to return to Earth in a decade.
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 three or four billion years ago.