NASA’s Perseverance Rover arrived on Mars last month, the culmination of years of design and development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). NASA began downloading images of the robot almost immediately after landing, but the team completed a full system check before taking the machine for a turn. Endurance finally took its first ride on Mars late last week and covered a total of 6.3 meters (21.3 feet).
Durability is about the size of a sub-compact car and weighs over 2000 pounds on earth. Even on Mars, it’s a big robot. Like the curiosity, this rover used a crane-powered air crane to perform a soft landing on Mars. NASA wanted to make sure perseverance was in full working order before driving it anywhere. It also needed a software update, which NASA completed in late February.
With the household, NASA pumped the gas on March 4th. It took about 33 minutes to complete throughput – accuracy is far more important than speed at a distance of about 230 million kilometers. First, the rover drove 13 feet forward. Then turn it 150 degrees before backing up another eight feet. This dance removed perseverance from the landing zone so that the team could use its navigation and hazard avoidance cameras to make a turn at the spot where it was dropped off by the downhill road. This could help engineers better understand the details of the retro-rocket landings on Mars.
An orbital view of the landing zone from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO).
NASA has already deployed the robotic arm of the Rover and performed tests on several of its key instruments, such as the Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX) and Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE). The team still has a few tests to complete before the Rover’s scientific mission begins in earnest. There are more tools to calibrate, and there are still protective lids to remove from the sample storage system and Ingenuity helicopter.
This first ride is just the beginning – Curiosity has set a record for more distance than any other rover, and Perseverance has redesigned wheels to keep it rolling even longer. There is also a lot to see in the Jezero crater. The crater was a lake that was fed by a river billions of years ago, and the delta is still visible. Scientists believe that this region is ideal for detecting signs of ancient life, and perseverance has the tools to do so.
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