During a Thursday maneuver to verify the proper operation of the system, a six-wheeled vehicle moved four meters, then turned 150 degrees and struck another 2.5 meters in the opposite direction. Moving back, Perseverance photographed the tracks he had ridden on the Martian surface. His maneuvers lasted 33 minutes, the AFP agency specified.
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“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to look at bike tracks,” Anais Zarifian, an engineer in charge of rover movements at NASA’s Jet Research and Development Center, told a news conference. “Our first maneuvers turned out incredibly well, this is an important stage that our mission has gone through,” Zarifian said.
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The rover will be able to cover 200 meters in one Martian day, which is slightly longer than the Earth one. The explorer is moving five times faster than Curiosity, NASA’s previous vehicle on Mars.
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Rover Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18 in Lake Crater. Scientists believe the crater was flooded more than three billion years ago. One of the goals of Perseverance is to collect samples of rocks on site, which will be transported to Earth during the next mission. The samples are then to be used to explore possible former life on the red planet.
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