33 minutes, 6.5 meters: The “Perseverance” Mars rover has successfully completed its first tour on the surface of Mars.
New York (dpa) – The “Perseverance” Mars rover has successfully completed its first tour on the surface of Mars. According to NASA information on Friday, the spacecraft covered 6.5 meters two weeks after it landed on the red planet – and it took 33 minutes on Thursday. The ride was intended as a test of tenacity (German for “stamina”).
“The four-wheel drive rover worked perfectly,” said Anis Zarifyan, a NASA engineer. “We are now confident that our payment system is working and can take us wherever the science takes us over the next two years.” When conducting scientific experiments, the Mars rover should cover distances of about 200 meters.
The “Perseverance”, which weighs about 1,000 kilograms and the size of a small car, landed on February 18 after 203 days of flight and the 472 million kilometers it had traveled in a perilous maneuver in a dry lake on Mars. The rover will inspect this lake, which has a diameter of about 45 kilometers, over the next two years.
It took eight years to develop and build the $ 2.5 billion (about 2.2 billion euros) car. Its mission is to search for traces of past microbial life on Mars and study the planet’s climate and geology.
