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NASA's Perseverance rover takes its first test drive on Mars

Percy is on the move!

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NASA's Perseverance rover takes its first test drive on Mars
By Chelsea Gohd 4 hours ago
Percy is on the move!

NASA's Perseverance rover has taken its first test drive on Mars, the agency announced Friday (March 5).
Perseverance, a car-sized rover that landed successfully on the Red Planet Feb. 18, just made its first short drive on Thursday, NASA officials said. The rover moved a total of 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) across the Martian terrain on a drive that took about 33 minutes, during which Perseverance moved forward, turned in place and backed up. The rover drives with a top speed of .01 miles per hour (.016 kilometers).
"Our first drive went incredibly well," NASA's Anais Zarifian, a Perseverance mobility test bed engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Zarifian added that the rover "works beautifully, we were so excited."

"This is really just the beginning," Zarifian said.
During the briefing, mission team members also announced that they are naming Perseverance's landing site in Jezero Crater "Octavia E. Butler Landing" after the famed science fiction author; the first science fiction author to receive the MacArthur Fellowship.
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Perseverance took its first steps on Mars, NASA revealed March 5, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA's Perseverance rover captured this image of its own footprints on Mars. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Perseverance took its first steps on Mars, NASA revealed March 5, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA's Perseverance rover captured this image of its own footprints on Mars. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
While Perseverance has the same body design as NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, improvements to its mobility system mean that it can drive for much longer in the same amount of time. While the two rovers have the same top speed, Perseverance's new cameras and improved navigation software allow it to think about where it's going while in motion.
So, while Curiosity had to essentially stop to think, Perseverance can "walk and chew gum at the same time," Zarifian said. This allows the rover to cover more ground more quickly, despite having the same "speed."

NASA's Perseverance rover's right navigation camera (Navcam) captured this image of the rover's Martian footprints on March 5, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

To prepare for this first drive, mission team members had the rover turn its wheels in place, making sure they were displaying their full range of motion and were ready for the short trip. NASA shared a short video clip on the rover's Twitter feed of one of the rover's wheels turning in the Martian surface as part of this preparation.

"A quick test of my steering, and things are looking good as I get ready to roll. My team and I are keen to get moving. One step at a time," Perseverance team members wrote on Twitter.

"So striking to see rover tracks that begin from nothing. @NASAPersevere is on the move!" Perseverance rover operator and Earth & planetary science Ph.D. candidate Erin Gibbons said on Twitter alongside a photo of the tracks the rover made on the Martian surface.

This first drive comes as Perseverance checks a handful of other Martian "firsts" off its list, which all seem to be going very well.

"Perseverance has been doing an exceptional job in her first two weeks on the red planet," Robert Hogg, the rover's deputy mission manager at JPL, said during the news briefing today.

Among these milestones are the rover's first arm stretch — an important first step to getting its robotic arm, a critical asset for sampling and scientific observation, moving — and the deployment of wind sensors — instruments that are part of the rover's weather station, which will monitor air temperature, humidity, radiation, dust and wind.

Rover controllers also recently checked in with the craft's RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment) and MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) instruments. The rover has also continued to send back images of its new, Martian environment back to Earth.
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"We are seeing all kinds of textures and rocks that are around Perseverance's landing site," Perseverance deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan of JPL told Space.com during the briefing when asked about what mission scientists are already gleaning the rover's images.

"But we are only just getting our instruments checked out, so these other instruments are really important for us to put together a model for how these rocks form and what their significance might be ... we landed in a very interesting area where we are trying to figure out the origin of these rocks," Morgan added.

Perseverance is the crown jewel of NASA's Mars 2020 mission, and will spend its time on the Red Planet searching for concrete signs of ancient life, along with collecting scientific data to do things like study the planet's complex climate; the rover will also be completing technology experiments like with Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter

 

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NASA names Perseverance rover's Mars touchdown site 'Octavia E. Butler Landing'

The name honors the late science fiction author Octavia E. Butler.

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NASA names Perseverance rover's Mars touchdown site 'Octavia E. Butler Landing'
By Elizabeth Howell 3 hours ago
The name honors the late science fiction author Octavia E. Butler.

NASA's Perseverance rover captured this view during its first test drive on Mars, on March 4, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The Perseverance rover's Red Planet touchdown site has been renamed for Octavia E. Butler, the noted African American science fiction author.
NASA announced they would informally redesignate the Mars rover's landing site inside Jezero Crater on Friday (March 5), during the same press conference where the agency revealed Perseverance made its first drive on Mars.
Butler was the first African American woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards that honor great science fiction, and the first science fiction writer overall who received a MacArthur Fellowship. Her notable work includes the stories "Kindred," "Bloodchild," "Speech Sounds," "Parable of the Sower," "Parable of the Talents," and the "Patternist" series. She died in 2006.

"Butler's pioneering work explores themes of race, gender equality in humanity, centering on the experiences of Black women at a time when such voices were largely absent from science fiction," Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said during the Friday press conference, which is available on YouTube.
"Butler's protagonists embodied determination and inventiveness, making her a perfect fit for the Perseverance rover mission and its theme of overcoming challenges," Stack Morgan continued. "Butler inspired and influenced the planetary science community and many beyond — including those typically underrepresented in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] fields. The fact that her works are as relevant today — if not more so — than when they were originally written and published is a testament to her vision, genius and timelessness."

NASA has a long-standing practice of informally naming landmarks on Mars and other worlds; these names are not recognized by the International Astronomical Union that officially designates solar system locations, but the names do show up in scientific papers, NASA said in a statement.

Previous Mars missions also included homages to prominent members of the science community or communicators of science, dating all the way back to the 1970s. The Mars Science Laboratory mission landing site for the Curiosity rover, in Gale Crater, was informally named for science fiction author Ray Bradbury in 2012, shortly after the author's death.

"Naming Perseverance's landing site in honor of Octavia E. Butler honors notable science fiction writers, a theme also used by the Mars Science Laboratory team," Stack Morgan added during the press conference. "We chose on this mission to continue this theme in appreciation of the role that science fiction writers have played in inspiring so many of us to become the engineers, scientists and explorers who turn science fiction into reality for the next generation."

In 2004, the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity had their landing site locations dubbed the "Columbia Memorial Station" and "Challenger Memorial Station," respectively, after the two fallen space shuttle crews of 2003 and 1986.

Previous to that, the Mars Pathfinder lander was renamed the "Carl Sagan Memorial Station" after touchdown with the Sojourner rover in 1997; Sagan, who died shortly before the landing, was a planetary scientist at Cornell University who played a role in several NASA missions, including the Voyager 1 and 2 golden records.

NASA's first Mars lander, Viking 1, was renamed "Thomas A. Mutch Memorial Station" in honor of Thomas Mutch, the leader of the Viking imaging team, after his death in 1980 — two years before the lander's mission ended. In the same era, Viking 2 received the new name of "Gerald Soffen Memorial Station" after Gerald Soffen, the chief scientist of the Viking missions.

The agency, in fact, extended this informal Mars naming practice to Saturn's moon Titan in 2007. NASA and the European Space Agency jointly agreed to name the Huygens touchdown site after Hubert Curien, whose work as chair of the ESA Council in the 1980s included setting up a science program, "Horizon 2000", that included the Huygens mission.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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