The rover has traveled its first meter

‘S diligence rover NASA Successfully rotated its wheels
Tuesday For the first time since landing two weeks ago, the company says it will move a few meters
Spatial US Friday. This was done on Thursday afternoon during the first voyage, and in order to verify the proper functioning of the system, the six-wheeled vehicle advanced 4 meters, then made a rotation on the left, about 2.5 meters before changing the rear maneuver.

By taking a backup, diligently NASA was able to photograph its own wheel tracks in Martian soil. In all, the rover, the size of a large SUV, covers a distance of six and a half meters in thirty-three minutes. “I don’t think I was very happy to see the wheel marks,” Anees Zarifian, the engineer in charge of the rover’s motion at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told a news conference. .

Three times faster than Curiosity

“Our first trip went incredibly well, which was a huge milestone for the mission,” he said. This vehicle can travel 200 meters to Mars (slightly longer days than Earth). It travels five times faster than Curiosity, while the other NASA rover still operates on Mars.

Perseverance landed in the Xero gorge on February 18, and scientists believe it was the home of a deep lake 3.5 billion years ago. The goal of this mission is to collect rock samples that will be brought to Earth by a subsequent mission 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 old river in the lake, and this is of particular interest to researchers because the sediment may have been deposited there in large quantities.

7.000 images

Before that, the ingenious helicopter, which will become the first motorized craft to fly to another planet, must be released from the bottom of the rover, which will still sit for a moment. NASA teams are currently looking for the best place to launch this historic flight, Robert Hawk, vice president of the mission, promised Friday, “by the end of spring.” The rover has already captured more than 7,000 images with its multiple cameras and sent them back to Earth.

In one of them, we find a light brown rock on which the first scientific tool, Supercam, was used, a sophisticated camera the size of a shoe box, designed by the French. It is equipped with a laser that can shoot a rock at a distance of 7 meters to analyze its structure. The results will be released by NASA next week.