The Perseverance Mars rover sails through its initial completion and activation, radiating about 7,000 photos so far, releasing its seven-foot-long robotic arm and taking a short test drive after a major software upgrade after landing, engineers said.
Robert Hogg, the deputy mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the $ 2.4 billion scientific instruments were all tested, along with a series of weather sensors around the harsh environment that the robot faces. staring, watching.
“Everything is going well with our latest mission to Mars,” he said. “Perseverance did her exceptional work during her first two weeks on the red planet … I’m glad we did our very first ride on Mars yesterday morning.”
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The one ton rover performed a short 13-foot ride, made a 150-degree turn to the left and then backed up about eight feet.
“Our first ride went incredibly well,” said Anais Zarifian, bed engineer for perseverance. She shows off a razor-sharp photo taken by one of the Rover’s 25 cameras, with corrugated tire tracks in the Martian soil.
“You can see the wheel tracks we left behind on Mars,” she told reporters. “I do not think I have ever been happier to see wheel tracks, and I have seen a lot of them. It’s just a big milestone.”
Like the Curiosity Rover that landed in another Mars crater in 2012, Perseverance moves at a top speed of just 0.1 km / h. But thanks to the improved navigation software and its cameras, we can really drive five times faster than Curiosity, and we are able to reach about 200 meters a day, ‘said Zarifian.
Perseverance was lowered to the floor of the 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 Pasadena native.
Deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan announced the honor, saying Butler’s protagonists ‘personify determination and ingenuity, making her a perfect fit for the Perseverance Rover mission.’
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The landing of the rover was orchestrated by software designed to tackle the challenges of the long, seven-month voyage to Mars and then the white-knuckle descent of seven minutes to the surface. After the engineers came down, they had the challenge of downloading the 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.
“It’s the software that really makes all the capabilities available that have perseverance available for our surface mission,” Hogg said. “It’s about 16 megabytes, so pretty small. But when used, it has 140 tasks that all work on the Rover’s computer at the same time.
“When we did this update, we had to be very careful not to run into major problems, because you know, there is no helpline to switch to or any way we can to run to the rover and hit the big reset button. ‘Therefore, we were very careful, and it was a great relief for the team to finish it.’
Scientists are studying initial images to determine the best path from the landing site to relatively nearby cliffs, indicating the erode edge of an ancient delta where a now-disappearing river once flowed into Jezero, possibly traces of the previous microbial laid down life.
Tele-views from the rover show layered, weather-resistant deposits resembling shales on Earth that regularly conserve organic carbon and other “biosignatures”.
Two potential routes to the delta have been identified, but the science team has not yet chosen the optimal course or determined a suitable area for test flights of an experimental $ 80 million drone still in the belly of the car.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
“Two weeks after the mission, we received about 7,000 images from the cameras’ cameras, including our first view of some of the geological targets of exploration that brought the car to Jezero,” Morgan said. “We are working closely with engineers to determine which path is the most efficient, safest and most scientifically interesting.”
“And then we’ll get there in front of the delta. From there we’ll go explore the delta, we’ll end up at the mouth of the river that once entered Jezero, where we’ll probably deposit our very first monster. “depot,” Morgan added.
Perseverance is the first mission to Mars specifically designed to search for evidence of earlier microbial life. It is equipped with an intricate system to collect promising soil and rock samples and lay them on the surface for eventual recovery and return to Earth with a combination of NASA spacecraft and the European Space Agency.
On Thursday, NASA announced a contract with Northrop Grumman, worth up to $ 84.5 million, to begin work on the propulsion system needed to send the recovered monsters into a Mars orbit after their recovery by a other NASA rover. The European Space Agency is designing a spacecraft to capture the samples by the end of the decade and send them back to Earth for a detailed laboratory analysis.
“This has been one for centuries for JPL and NASA,” Hogg said. “Although it seems like a long time, it’s going to pass in the blink of an eye when we can bring these (monsters) back to earth for scientists around the world to analyze.”