Perseverance takes its first steps on Mars – 20 minutes
Rover tenacity from NASA She turned her wheels
Mars The agency said that for the first time since landing two weeks ago, it is moving a few meters away
my place American Friday. During this first flight on Thursday afternoon, aimed at verifying the correct operation of the system, the car, equipped with six wheels, advanced 4 meters, then turned on itself to the left, before turning, it made a back maneuver of about 2.5 meters.
With the backup, Perseverance was able to capture a photo of its own wheel tracks on Mars soil, published by NASA. In total, the rover, the size of a large SUV, covered six and a half meters in thirty-three minutes. “I don’t think I was very happy to see the wheel marks,” said Anis Zarifyan, the engineer in charge of rover mobility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where it was built.
Three times faster than curiosity
“Our first flight went very well, which is a huge milestone for the mission,” she said. The spacecraft will be able to travel 200 meters on each Mars day (days slightly longer than those on Earth). It travels five times faster than the Curiosity spacecraft, which is still operating on Mars.
The Perseverance landed on February 18 at Jezero Crater, which scientists believe was home to a deep lake 3.5 billion years ago. The aim of the mission is to collect rock samples that will be returned to Earth on a later mission, in order to search for traces of ancient life on the Red Planet. Scientists are now considering two voyages of perseverance to join the delta formed by the flow of an ancient river into the lake, which is of particular interest to researchers because the sediments may have been deposited there in large quantities.
Deja 7.000 photos
Before that, the Ingenuity helicopter, which will become the first robotic vehicle to fly to another planet, must be launched from under the rover, where it is still standing. NASA teams are now looking for the best place to take the historic trip “before the end of spring,” as promised by Deputy Chief of Mission Robert Hough Friday. The rover has already sent more than 7,000 images, captured by its many cameras, to Earth.
On one, we can see a light brown rock that was first used on the scientific instrument SuperCam, a high-tech, shoe-box-sized camera, designed by the French. It is equipped with a laser that can fire a rock 7 meters away so you can analyze its composition. NASA will present the results next week.
