The endurance rover can travel 200 meters a day, but scientists must run tests and safety reviews before venturing any further.
NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has made its first short voyage on the surface of the red planet, two weeks after the Robot Science Lab was perfectly placed on the bottom of a huge crater, mission managers announced on Friday.
The Perseverance rover ventured from its landing position for the first time on Thursday, two weeks after landing on the Red Planet, looking for signs of past life.
Taking instructions from mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, the rover rolled forward four meters, turned about 150 degrees to the left, and then backed a total of 6.5 meters a total of 6.5 meters during the half-hour test in the Jezero crater, where an ancient, long-disappeared lake bed and river delta is located on Mars.
“It went incredibly well,” said JPL Persistence Mobility Test Engineer Anais Zarifian during a conference call briefing with reporters, calling it a “major milestone” for the mission.
The roundabout roundabout took just 33 minutes and went so well that the six-wheeled rover was back on the move on Friday.
Perseverance can drive an average of 200 meters per day.
The Martian surface just below NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover is seen with the rover down-look camera in an image captured on February 22, 2021 [File: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Reuters]NASA showed a photo taken by the rover with the wheel tracks that remained on the reddish, sandy Martian soil after its first drive.
Another vivid image of the surrounding landscape shows rough, reddish terrain with large, dark boulders in the foreground and a high ledge in the distance marking the edge of the river delta.
I am on the move! I just did my first test drive on Mars and covered about 5 meters. You see at the very beginning of my bike tracks. Much more to do. pic.twitter.com/7tFIwWFfJ4
– NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) March 5, 2021
According to Robert Hogg, deputy mission manager, Perseverance and its hardware, including the main robotic arm, appear to be working just fine so far.
However, JPL engineers have yet to perform additional equipment checks on the rover’s many instruments before they are ready to send the robot on a more ambitious journey as part of its primary task of searching for traces of fossilized microbial life.
The team has yet to conduct post-landing tests of the rover’s sophisticated system to drill and collect rock samples for return to Earth on future Mars missions.
The deck of NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover with the planetary X-ray lithochemistry instrument, one of the instruments on the stowed arm, can be seen in an image captured by the rover’s navigational cameras on Mars on February 20, 2021 [File: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Reuters]Once the endurance system tests are completed, the rover will head into an ancient river delta to collect stones for its return to Earth in a decade.
Scientists are considering whether to take the smoother route to the nearby delta or a potentially more difficult route with fascinating remains from that once watery time three to four billion years ago.
