WASHINGTON, March 6, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – The Mars rover Perseverance has
successfully conducted its first test drive on the Red Planet, the US space
agency NASA said Friday.
The six-wheeled rover travelled about 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in 33 minutes
on Thursday, NASA said.
It drove four meters forward, turned in place 150 degrees to the left, and
then backed up 2.5 meters, leaving tire tracks in the Martian dust.
“This was our first chance to ‘kick the tires’ and take Perseverance out
for a spin,” said Anais Zarifian, Perseverance mobility test bed engineer at
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Zarifian said the
test drive went “incredibly well” and represented a “huge milestone for the
mission and the mobility team.”
“We’re going to do some longer drives,” she added. “This is just the
beginning.”
NASA engineers said they were studying possible routes for longer rover
voyages on the surface of Mars.
A slightly longer trip was planned for Friday, and perhaps another
Saturday if all goes well, NASA said.
The rover can cover 200 meters per Martian day, which is slightly longer
than a day on Earth.
And it goes five times faster than Curiosity, its predecessor, which is
still functioning eight years after landing on Mars.
Perseverance deputy mission manager Robert Hogg said engineers were also
preparing for the first flight of a helicopter drone carried by the rover.
Hogg said the rover team was working out flight zones and hoped to conduct
the first flight in late spring or early summer.
He said the mission had not experienced any major problems so far.
“It’s all just minor stuff,” he said. “Everything we’ve tried has worked
beautifully.”
Perseverance was launched on July 30, 2020 and landed on the surface of
Mars on February 18 on a mission to search for signs of past life on the Red
Planet.
The rover’s primary mission will last just over two years but it is likely
to remain operational well beyond that.
Over the coming years, Perseverance will attempt to collect 30 rock and
soil samples in sealed tubes to be sent back to Earth sometime in the 2030s
for analysis.
About the size of an SUV, the craft weighs a ton, is equipped with a
seven-foot-long robotic arm, has 19 cameras, two microphones and a suite of
cutting-edge instruments.
So far it has sent back more than 7,000 photographs, including one of a
light brown rock that was used to test a device called SuperCam: an ultra-
sophisticated French-made camera the size of a shoe box that can shoot a
laser beam at rocks up to seven meters away to analyze their makeup.
The rover is only the fifth to set its wheels down on Mars, all of them
American. The feat was first accomplished in 1997.
The United States is preparing for an eventual human mission to the
planet, though planning remains very preliminary.