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NASA’s Perseverance rover is gearing up for launch in the coming months by undergoing final checks, and has just gone through one more item on the list: making sure it’s properly balanced.
Part of the final preparations to prepare the rover for your trip to Mars is to verify that its center of gravity is in the right place, which is done using a tool called the rover’s rotating attachment. The rover is placed on a rack bracket and rotates lengthwise, like a pig on a spit, to check its balance along its x axis.
With that marked, the rover moves to a turntable, which spins like a record player. This allows engineers to check their center of gravity relative to their z-axis and y-axis (top to bottom and left to right).
Any slight imbalance in weight distribution can cause problems such as parts to wear out faster than expected or problems with balance when the vehicle is moving on uneven surfaces or extreme slopes. Therefore, these are accounted for by adding small weights to the opposite side of the mobile whenever there is an imbalance. In total, after calibration, the team added 13.8 pounds of weight to the rover, which NASA says takes its center of gravity 0.025 millimeters from where it should be.
The total rover now weighs 2,260 pounds, making it the heaviest payload ever delivered to the surface of Mars. More weight means that the vehicle is more difficult to land safely, since the very thin atmosphere on Mars makes it slower to brake the vehicle as it falls. Therefore, NASA has been working on a supersonic parachute system that can slow the craft down as it enters the atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph. The massive Perseverance parachute cover, made of nylon, Technora, and Kevlar fiber, deploys to a width of 70.5 feet and will slow the Mach 1.7 ship to 200 miles per hour.
Perseverance will launch over a two-week period beginning July 17 of this year.
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