The Perseverance Mars rover is navigating through its initial verification and activation, retransmitted up to 7,000 photos so far, unraveling the robot’s 7-meter-long arm and performing a short test after a major post-landing software upgrade, engineers said Friday.
Robert Hogg, deputy director of mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the $ 2.4 billion rover’s scientific instruments were checked, along with a suite of weather sensors to keep track. the harsh environment the robot is facing.
“Everything is going very well in our last mission to Mars,” he said. “Perseverance has done an exceptional job in the first two weeks on the red planet … I’m glad to report that we made our first trip to Mars yesterday afternoon.”
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The one-ton rover made a short 13-foot journey, made a 150-degree left turn, and then made a turn of about eight feet.
“Our first trip went incredibly well,” said Anais Zarifian, Perseverance’s mobility testing engineer. She showed a sharp photograph like a camera taken by one of the rover’s 25 cameras, which showed traces of ribbed tires in Martian soil.
“You can see the tracks of the wheels we left on Mars,” she told reporters. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see the wheel tracks and I’ve seen a lot of them. This is just a huge stage.”
Like the Curiosity rover that landed in another Mars crater in 2012, Perseverance moves at a top speed of just 0.1 mph. But thanks to improvements to the improved navigation software and its suite of cameras, “we can really drive five times faster than Curiosity and we are able to average about 200 meters per (day),” Zarifian said. .
Perseverance was lowered to the floor of Jezero Crater on February 18 at a site now known as Octavia E. Butler Landing, named in honor of the African-American science fiction writer from Pasadena.
The project’s deputy scientist, Katie Stack Morgan, announced the honor, saying that Butler’s protagonists “embodied determination and inventiveness, making it a perfect fit for the Perseverance rover’s mission.”
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The landing of the rover was orchestrated by software designed to meet the challenges of the seven-month cruise to Mars and then the white seven-minute descent to the surface. Once down, the engineers faced the somewhat daunting task of removing unnecessary software and uploading the programming that would be used for the surface scientific mission.
The software update took a few days.
“This is the software that really launches all the capabilities that Perseverance has available for our surface mission,” Hogg said. “It’s 16 megabytes, so it’s quite small. But when it works, it has 140 tasks, all running simultaneously on the rover’s computer.
“When we did this update, we had to be very careful not to have major problems, because, you know, there is no helpline or any way to run the rover and press the big reset button. they were very careful and the achievement was a great relief for the team “.
Scientists are studying initial images to determine the best path from the landing site to the relatively nearby rocks that mark the eroded edge of an ancient delta where a now-defunct river once flowed into Jezero, possibly depicting traces of past microbial life.
The telephoto views on the rover show layered, weather-resistant deposits, similar in appearance to Earth’s shales, which frequently retain organic carbon and other “biosignatures”.
Two potential delta routes have been identified, but the scientific team has not yet selected the optimal course or identified an area suitable for testing flights of an experimental $ 80 million drone still attached to the rover’s belly.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
“Two weeks after the mission, we received approximately 7,000 images from the rover’s cameras, including our first views of some of the geological exploration targets that brought the rover to Jezero,” Morgan said. “We are now working with engineers to determine which path is the most efficient and safest and most scientifically interesting.”
“And then we’ll get there in front of the delta. From there, we will go and explore the delta, eventually reaching the mouth of the river that once entered Jezero, where we will probably even deposit our first sample deposit, “Morgan added.
Perseverance is the first mission to Mars specifically designed to look for evidence of past microbial life. It is equipped with a complex system to collect promising soil and rock samples and deposit them on the surface for possible recovery and return to Earth using a combination of NASA spacecraft and the European Space Agency.
On Thursday, NASA announced a contract with Northrop Grumman, worth up to $ 84.5 million, to begin work on the propulsion system needed to launch samples recovered from Mars orbit after their recovery by another NASA rover. The European Space Agency is designing a spacecraft to capture the samples by the end of the decade and return them to Earth for detailed laboratory analysis.
“This is one for the JPL and NASA eras,” Hogg said. “Even if it seems a long time away, it will pass in an instant, when we can get these (evidence) back to Earth for scientists around the world to analyze.”