Rover exercised ,perseverance takes first command over the surface of the Red Planet

SmArTviews March 07, 2021 Science

 Rover exercised ,perseverance takes first command over the surface of the Red Planet
 Rover exercised on Red Planet

"It went very well," said a mobility test engineer at persistence, describing it as a "great milestone" for the task.

On Friday, mission managers said NASA's Mars spacecraft has taken its first short flight on the surface of the Red Planet, two weeks after the perfect landing of a robotic science lab on the floor of a massive crater.

A six-wheel, vehicle-sized Astrobiology Probe placed 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) on the odometer Thursday during a half-hour test ride inside Jezero Crater, an ancient and long-vanished lake bed site and a river delta in Mars.

Taking directions from task managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, the spacecraft dashed 4 meters (13.1 feet) forward, turned about 150 degrees to the left, and then turned back another 2.5 meters (8.2 feet).

"It went very well," said Anis Zarifyan, a mobility test engineer at Tenacity's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during a conference call with reporters, describing it as a "tremendous milestone" for the mission.

NASA showed a rover photo showing the tread marks that were left in the reddish sandy soil of Mars after its first drive.

Another vivid image of the surrounding landscape shows rugged, pink terrain strewn with large, dark boulders in the foreground and a long outcrop of layered rock sediments in the distance - indicating the edge of the river delta.

Some additional short-haul driving tests are scheduled for Friday. Perseverance, capable of achieving an average of 200 meters of driving per day.

But JPL engineers still have additional checks of the equipment to operate it on many of the rover tools before they are ready to send the robot on a more ambitious journey as part of its primary mission to search for traces of fossil microbial life.

So far, Deputy Mission Director Robert Hogg said the Tenacity and its apparatus, including its main robotic arm, appear to be operating flawlessly.

 The team still has to do post-landing tests of the rover's complex system of digging and collecting rock samples to bring them back to Earth on future Mars missions.

NASA announced that it had named its "Octavia E-Butler Landing" landing site on February 18, in honor of the award-winning American science fiction writer. Butler, a native of Pasadena, California, died in 2006 at the age of 58.

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