Did you know that NASA’s next Mars rover has almost identical siblings on Earth for testing? Even better, he is the first to roll through the iconic Martian landscape.
As NASA’s Mars rover Persona Varens passes into space towards the red planet, six-wheeler twins are ready to orbit the Earth here.
The full-scale engineering version of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover – equipped with wheels, cameras and powerful computers to help it operate autonomously – has just moved into its garage house at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The rover model dated Sept. On the 1st passed his first driving test in a relatively warehouse-like assembly room at JPL. Engineers will take him to Mars Yard next week, where a field of red dirt filled with rocks and other obstacles mimics red. The surface of the planet.
A garage in front of the Mars Yard at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California now houses a full-scale engineering model of NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
“Persuasion’s mobility team can’t wait to finally drive our test rover out,” said Anas Zarifian, JPL’s bed engineer for mobility testing. “This is a test robot that comes close to simulating the actual mission performance on Mars – with wheels, eyes and brains all in – so it will be especially fun to work with this rover.”
Wait, why do we need twins?
Don’t fly to Mars with a firm mechanic. To avoid as many unwanted issues as possible after the rover lands on February 18, 2021, the team requires the rover of this Earth Bound Vehicle System Test Bed (VSTB) to transmit commands before the hardware and software software can continue operating. How it will work before. Mars. This rover model Dell will be especially useful for completing a full set of software software tests so that the team can send patches when perversion comes to Mars or after it lands.
Engineers have tested the Earth Bound pair of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover for the first time in a warehouse-like assembly room at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
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And just as Khant has a proper name – who works hard to get a rover to Mars in the midst of an epidemic – his twin name is also: Ptimism. While Optimism is an acronym for Alpacional Perseverance Twin for the integration of mechanisms and instruments sent to Mars, the name also approves of the mantra of the team that spent two years planning and assembling it.
“No optimism is allowed,” said Matt Stumbo, VSTB Rover’s leading member of the test bed team. “So we named the test rover TPTism to remind us of the work we have to do to fully test the system.” . Our job is to find problems, not just that Hope
Activities will work. As we work through the issues with Ttism, we will gain confidence in our abilities and confidence in our ability to work on Mars.
Almost identical
The ptimism is almost identical to speed: it is the same size, has the same mobility system and top driving speed (0.094 mph, or 0.15 kph), and has the same special “head”, known as a remote sensing mast. After the second phase of the building at the beginning of the new year, it will have a complete suite of science instruments, cameras and computer “brain” perseverance, as well as its unique system for collecting stone and soil samples.
But while Tpitism lives in JPL, there are also some earthly differences. For one thing, when power is obtained from a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (a type of atomic battery that has reliably operated space missions since the 1960s), the Optimism features a navel that can be plugged in for electrical power. It also provides a cord Ethernet connection, which commands the mission team to send and receive engineering data back from Optimism without having to install a radio persuasive use radio for communication. Mars comes with a personal heating system to keep it warm in the harsh atmosphere, while Optimism relies on a cooling system for hot Southern California summer management.
Technicians move the engineered version of the Perseverance Mars rover to its new home in the Mars Yard, part of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
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Welcome to the family
TPTism is not JPL’s only VSTB rover. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, which has been searching for the Red Planet since landing in 2012, has twins named MAGGI (Mars Automated Giant Gizmo for Integrated Engineering). Maggie is helping the Curiosity team with a strategy of driving through particularly challenging terrain and drilling rocks.
Optimism and Maggie will live together in the Mars Yard, giving JPL engineers a two-car garage for the first time.
“The missions that are in operation need high-fidelity replicas of their systems for testing,” Stumbo said. “Curiosity missions have learned lessons from Maggie that were impossible to learn in any other way. Now that we have Optimism, the Persons mission is well equipped to learn what they need to succeed on Mars.”
The Perseverance Rover’s astrobiology mission will search for signs of ancient microbial life. It will also feature the planet’s climate and geology, pave the way for human exploration of the red planet, and will be the first planetary eclipse to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust). Subsequent missions, currently in collaboration with the European Space Agency, will send a spacecraft to Mars under consideration by NASA, so that these cached samples can be collected from the surface and analyzed in depth on Earth.
The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes a mission to the moon as a way to prepare for the red planet’s human exploration. Accused with astronauts returning to the moon by 2024, NASA will establish a continuous presence on and around the moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis lunar research plans.
Operates and manages JPL, Perseverance and Curiosity Rovers, operated by Caltech for NASA in Pasadena, California.
Learn more about the Mars 2020 mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance
News Media Contact
Jia-Rui Cook / DC Next
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0724 / 818-393-9011
[email protected] / [email protected]
Alana Johnson’s / Gray Hautaloma
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1501 / 202-358-0668
[email protected]/[email protected]
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