First NASA Rover Drive: NASA's Latest Mars Rover Hits Dusty Red Road

The newest Mars rover of NASA bumped the dusty red road this week, setting in its first drive test 21 feet on the odometer.
On Thursday, two weeks after establishing itself on the red planet to find signs of past life, the Perseverance rover embarked from its landing position.

The circular, backward, and forward drive lasted for just 33 minutes and integrated so well that more driving was ready to be drawn Friday and Saturday for the six-wheeled perseverance rover.

The Rover's First Test Drive

Rich Rieber, the NASA engineer who schemed the route said: "This is certainly the beginning of our journey here."

"This is going to be like the expedition, adventures along the way, hopefully, no monsters, and I'm sure there will be surplus stories written about it."

In the rover's first test drive, Perseverance rover advanced 13 feet (4 meters), then it took a 150-degree left turn, and then backed up 8 feet (2.5 meters). At a news conference on Friday in Pasadena, California, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA released images of the rover tracks over and around small rocks. Engineer Anais Zarifian said he doesn't think he has ever been happier to see wheel tracks even though he has seen a lot of them.

Perseverance Rover Wags Its Wheels

NASA's Perseverance rover wags one of its wheels in this set of photos collected by the left Navigation Camera of the rover on March 4, 2021. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Flight controllers are still monitoring all of Perseverance's systems. Till now, everything is looking okay. On Tuesday, the perseverance rover 2-meter (7-foot) robot arm, for example, stretched its muscles for the first time.

Before the perseverance rover can go for an old river delta to obtain rocks for a possible return to earth, the rover must drop its commonly known protective "belly pan" and release ingenuity, which is an experimental helicopter.

In the event, Perseverance rover alighted right on the edge of a nice, flat spot of a prospective helicopter, according to Rich Rieber. So the plan is to drive the rover out of this helicopter landing strip, release the pan, then come back for Ingenuity's highly expected test flight. All this should be done by late spring.

Researchers are arguing whether to take the smooth way to get to the nearby delta or a likely tougher way with fascinating pieces from 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, which was once a watery time.

Perseverance's Landing Site

Perseverance Rover is NASA's biggest and most detailed rover yet and it became the ninth spacecraft of the United State to successfully touch down on Mars on Feb. 18. With China hoping to land its smaller rover-presently orbiting the red planet-in a few months to come.

NASA researchers, meanwhile, made it known on Friday that they've named Perseverance's landing site in honor of Octavia E. Butler, the late science fiction writer who grew up close to JPL in Pasadena. She was among the first African Americans to get mainstream attention for science fiction.

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