NASA Perseverance drives on Mars for first time

NASA has announced that its Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has performed its first drive on Mars’ terrain. The NASA Perseverance rover drove on the Red Planet Thursday, covering a distance of 21.3 feet or 6.5 meters.

Serving as a mobility test, the drive was just one of several milestones NASA Perseverance will be achieving on the Mars mission. The drive helped team members examine and calibrate every system, subsystem and instrument on the rover.

The NASA rover is expected to commute 656 feet / 200 meters or more once it starts pursuing its scientific targets.

Anais Zarifian, NASA Perseverance mobility test bed engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a press release, “When it comes to wheeled vehicles on other planets, there are few first-time events that measure up in significance to that of the first drive. This was our first chance to ‘kick the tires’ and take Perseverance out for a spin. The rover’s six-wheel drive responded superbly. We are now confident our drive system is good to go, capable of taking us wherever the science leads us over the next two years.”

The rover’s drive lasted about 33 minutes. The Mars rover moved forward 13 feet or 4 meters and turned in place 150 degrees to the left. It then backed up to 8 feet or 2.5 meters to temporarily park itself at a new site.

NASA said in the release that to help learn the dynamics of a retrorocket landing on Mars, its engineers used the Mars rover’s Navigation and Hazard Avoidance Cameras to photograph the exact area where the rover touched down, dispersing the Red Planet’s dust with engine plumes.

Just two days earlier, engineers unstowed, for the first time, NASA Perseverance’s 7-foot-long or 2-meter-long robotic arm. Each of the arm’s five joints was flexed over the course of two hours.

Robert Hogg, the Mars rover’s deputy mission manager, said, “Tuesday’s first test of the robotic arm was a big moment for us. That’s the main tool the science team will use to do close-up examination of the geologic features of Jezero Crater, and then we’ll drill and sample the ones they find the most interesting. When we got confirmation of the robotic arm flexing its muscles, including images of it working beautifully after its long trip to Mars – well, it made my day.”