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The “Perseverance” rover has successfully completed its first Mars tour. According to information from NASA on Friday, the rover traveled a distance of 6.5 meters two weeks after landing on the Red Planet, and took a good 33 minutes on Thursday.
The trip was intended to be a test of perseverance (in German, more or less “staying power”). “The rover’s six-wheel drive worked perfectly,” said NASA engineer Anais Zarifian. “We are now confident that our propulsion system is operational and can take us anywhere science takes us for the next two years.”
Explore the climate and geology
To carry out scientific experiments, the Mars rover will travel distances of around 200 meters, searching for traces of previous microbial life and investigating the planet’s climate and geology. The rover will also take rock and dust samples. Scientists hope the mission will provide new insights into the origin of the universe.
“Perseverance” weighs around 1,000 kilograms and is about the size of a small car. Development and construction of the roughly $ 2.5 billion (about € 2.2 billion) vehicle had taken eight years.
On February 18, after 203 days of flight and 472 million kilometers traveled, the rover landed in a risky maneuver in a dry lake on Mars. The rover will examine the lake with a diameter of around 45 kilometers for the next two years.
Secret code on the parachute
After landing, netizens discovered a message hidden in the parachute with which the rover was sailing towards Mars: an irregular pattern of red and white stripes could be seen in the video recordings. This could be binary code like that used in computers.
Red corresponds to 1, white to 0 and each of the four rings of the parachute to a word. On the parachute it says “DARE MIGHTY THINGS”, in English “dare big things”. That’s the motto of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which builds satellites and probes for NASA. JPL geographic coordinates are also stored (read more about decoding the code here).
