Mars rover Perseverance applies to a ‘spin’
The Mars rover Perseverance has successfully conducted its first try on the Red World, the US space agency NASA said Friday.
The six-wheeled rover travelled about 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in 33 minutes on Thursday, NASA explained. It drove four meters forwards, turned set up 150 degrees left, and then backed up 2.5 meters, leaving tire tracks in the Martian dust.
“This is our first chance to ‘kick the tires’ and take Perseverance out for a spin,” said Anais Zarifian, Perseverance mobility test bed engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Zarifian said the try went “incredibly well” and represented a good “huge milestone for the objective and the mobility crew.” “We’re going to do some much longer drives,” she added. “This is just the beginning.”
NASA engineers said they were studying likely routes for longer rover voyages on the top of Mars. A somewhat longer trip was organized for Friday, as well as perhaps another Saturday if all should go well, NASA stated. The rover can cover 200 meters per Martian day, which is slightly longer when compared to a day on Earth.
And it goes five occasions faster than Curiosity, its predecessor, which continues to be performing eight years after landing on Mars. Perseverance deputy objective manager Robert Hogg explained engineers were also preparing for the first air travel of a helicopter drone carried by the rover.
Hogg said the rover workforce was working out air travel zones and hoped to conduct the first flight found in late spring or perhaps early summer.
He said the mission hadn't experienced any major concerns so far. “It’s all just small stuff,” he said.
“Everything we’ve tried spent some time working beautifully.” Perseverance premiered on July 30, 2020 and landed on the surface of Mars on February 18 on a objective to find signs of past lifestyle on the Red World.
The rover’s primary mission will last just over 2 yrs but it is likely to remain operational well beyond that. Above the arriving years, Perseverance will try to accumulate 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes to come to be repaid to Earth sometime in the 2030s for evaluation.
About how big is an SUV, the craft weighs quite a bit, has a seven-foot-long robotic arm, has 19 cameras, two microphones and a suite of cutting-edge instruments.
Up to now it has repaid more than 7,000 photographs, including among a light brown rock that was used to check a system called SuperCam: an ultra- sophisticated French-made camera how big is a shoe package that may shoot a laser at rocks up to seven meters aside to investigate their makeup.
The rover is only the fifth to set its wheels down on Mars, every one of them American. The feat was first accomplished in 1997.
The United States is preparing for an eventual human objective to the earth, though planning remains very preliminary.
Source: www.theindependentbd.com
