Here’s What NASA’s Perseverance Rover's First 100 Days on Mars Looked Like: The car-sized spacecraft has captured over 75,000 images of the Red Planet.
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 peop
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NASA s Mars helicopter Ingenuity touches down on Red Planet
NASA s Mars helicopter Ingenuity has been dropped on the surface of the Red Planet ahead of its historic first flight scheduled for April 11. Ingenuity flew to Mars while being attached to the belly of NASA s Perseverance rover, which made a February 18 touch down on the Red Planet. #MarsHelicopter touchdown confirmed! Its 293 million mile (471 million km) journey aboard @NASAPersevere ended with the final drop of 4 inches (10 cm) from the rover s belly to the surface of Mars today, NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, tweeted late on Saturday. Next milestone? Survive the night.
It then backed up an additional 2.5 metres.
The process of searching for life - which involves careful management by hundreds of world leading scientists - could take until the 2030s.
Perseverance will spend at least two years drilling into rocks in a mission which has to be handled with utmost care.
Anais Zarifian, one of Perseverance rover’s mobility engineers, said: “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.
NASA rover takes first drive on Mars (Image: Getty Images)
NASA celebrates rover touch-down on Mars (Image: Getty Images)
NASA's Perseverance rover takes a drive on Mars for the first time, see pic - NASA displayed a photo taken by the rover showing the wheel tread marks left in the reddish, sandy Martian soil after its first drive.