CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) – NASA’s newest Mars rover hit the dusty red road this week, putting 21 feet on the odometer on its first test drive.
The Perseverance rover ventured from its landing position on Thursday, two weeks after landing on the red planet in search of signs of past life.
The roundabout, the round-trip movement lasted only 33 minutes and was so good that more direction was made available on Friday and Saturday for the six-wheeled space vehicle.
“This is really the beginning of our journey here,” said Rich Rieber, the NASA engineer who planned the route. “This is going to be like the Odyssey, adventures along the way, I hope nothing from Cyclops, and I’m sure there will be a lot of stories written about it.”
In its first charge, Perseverance advanced 4 meters (13 feet), made a 150 degree turn to the left and retreated 2.5 meters. During a press conference on Friday, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shared photos of its tracks on and around small rocks.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see the wheel marks and I’ve seen many of them,” said engineer Anais Zarifian.
Flight controllers are still checking all Perseverance systems. So far, everything looks good. The rover’s 2-meter robot arm, for example, flexed its muscles for the first time on Tuesday.
Before the car-sized space vehicle can head to an ancient river delta to collect rocks for a possible return to Earth, it must drop its so-called “belly belly” of protection and launch an experimental helicopter called Ingenuity.
It turns out that Perseverance landed right on the edge of a potential helicopter airstrip – a nice, flat spot, according to Rieber. Therefore, the plan is to drive off this airstrip, leave the platform and then return to Ingenuity’s highly anticipated test flight. All of this should be done in late spring.
Scientists are debating whether to take the smoothest route to reach the nearby delta or a possibly more difficult way with intriguing traces from that once watery 3 billion to 4 billion years ago.
Perseverance – NASA’s largest and most elaborate rover so far – became the ninth U.S. spacecraft to successfully land on Mars on February 18. China hopes to land its smallest rover – currently orbiting the red planet – in a few months.
Meanwhile, NASA scientists announced on Friday that they named the Perseverance landing site in honor of the late science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who grew up alongside the JPL in Pasadena. She was one of the first African-Americans to receive the attention of mainstream science fiction. His works include “Bloodchild and Other Stories” and “Parable of the Sower”.
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