Taking the first spin
Two weeks after it landed on the planet, the rover took a short drive on the floor of the massive crater putting a total of 6.5 meters on its odometer during a half-hour test spin on Mars. The rover rolled 4 meters forward, turned about 150 degrees to its left and then drove backwards another 2.5 meters. “It went incredibly well,” Anais Zarifian, a JPL mobility test engineer for Perseverance, said during a teleconference briefing with reporters.
Capturing first audio from another world
Apart from being an astrobiology lab, the rover has been equipped with some of the most high-end instruments to make it as close to a living embodiment. One of those pieces of equipment is a mic that captured the audio of the rover moving on another world. In the audio clip released by the US space agency in March, bangs, pings, and rattles of the six-wheeled rover could be heard clearly. Two versions of the audio clip of the same drive were released by Nasa. "A lot of people, when they see the images, don't appreciate that the wheels are metal," said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer and rover driver at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "When you're driving with these wheels on rocks, it's actually very noisy," Verma added.