NASA’s Perseverance rover navigates Mars for the first time

Perseverance, the car-sized rover that NASA landed on Mars last month, has made its first spin on the rocky surface of Jezero crater, NASA announced today. The rover’s six wheels drifted about 21 feet to carry out a key mobility test Thursday as engineers on Earth prepare to execute the mission’s core science objectives.

The rover’s six aluminum wheels left footprints in the Martian soil, as captured by one of its onboard cameras, after driving straight 13 feet, then turning back 8 feet. Anais Zarifian, Perseverance Mobility Testbed Engineer, told reporters that everything went “incredibly well” and performed better than during pre-launch tests on Earth.

Image: NASA / JPL

“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier seeing wheel tracks, and I’ve seen a lot of them,” he says. “This is just a huge milestone for the mission and the mobility team. We have driven on Earth, but driving on Mars is really the end goal. “

Though short and slow, the unit’s demonstration gave engineers renewed confidence that NASA’s $ 2.4 billion rover is ready to travel some 200 meters over the next two years to analyze rocks and collect coveted samples of rock. Martian soil for a future return mission. “It was amazing to see this last night. We are very happy with this, ”says Robert Hogg, Perseverance’s deputy mission director.

Like its sister vehicle, the Curiosity, Perseverance’s top speed is 0.1 miles per hour, “so it’s not very fast,” says Zarifian. It uses a “bogie” suspension system that can climb rocks as big as its own wheels, about 20 inches in diameter, while keeping the main body level.

But landing a wheeled robot on Mars isn’t about speed. With an improved computer to avoid obstacles and sand pits, “we will have less time to plan tours and downtime, and more time to do science,” says Zarifian.

Image: NASA / JPL

Since landing on February 18, Perseverance has transmitted thousands of images from most of its 19 onboard cameras, including a chart released Friday showing the Jezero Delta, a target site the rover must drive to in the future. near. Scientists say the elevated landform, which is surrounded by an obstacle course of rocks and sand pits, is a cross between an ancient dry river and the lake that used to be Jezero 3.5 billion years ago.

Mission teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are mulling over different paths for Perseverance’s journey to the delta, with the goal of settling on one in the coming weeks that is “more efficient, safer, and more more scientifically interesting, “says Katie Stack Morgan, the project’s mission scientist deputy.

NASA released the first high-resolution panorama of Perseverance this week captured by the rover’s Mastcam-Z camera. The 79 images of the mosaic were taken on the Martian afternoon of February 22, and a YouTube user edited them into a 4K video that slowly travels the horizon of Jezero.

The rocks featured in the new Perseverance images “were likely deposited by rivers flowing into ancient Lake Jezero,” Morgan says, adding that scientists are working to understand the rock’s origin.

Perseverance launched from Florida last summer for a seven-month trip to the Red Planet, taking advantage of a two-month window of time when Earth and Mars closely align in their orbits around the Sun once every two years. 293 million miles later, it survived a quick seven-minute dive through the Martian atmosphere last month and made an extremely complex landing in Jezero Crater, a dry lake bed that scientists hope may contain signs. of fossilized microbial life from billions of years ago.

The rover mission team recalled the rover’s landing site at Jezero naming it after Octavia E. Butler, the late science fiction author and the first black woman to win a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award.