NASA’s Perseverance rover is transferring throughout the floor of Mars sooner than any rover earlier than. In February the rover broke a 17-year-old file for the longest drive by a rover in a single Martian day, however now it’s persevering with to hurry alongside towards its new goal, the Jezero crater delta.
“Its precise pace is just below a tenth of a mile per hour, nevertheless it’s sooner than its predecessors,” wrote Roger Wiens of Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory, principal investigator for Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument and co-investigator to its SHERLOC instrument, in a latest weblog put up concerning the rover’s progress. “It’s making comparatively fast progress by devoting a number of hours per day to driving on very easy terrain.”
It’s the cumulative day by day progress that issues most to the rover’s long-term science mission, much more than touring lengthy distances on particular person days, Wiens writes: “Total, it’s not simply the single-day drive that issues; it’s tougher to place collectively a steady marketing campaign. That requires sufficient vitality, sufficient time within the day, and sufficient knowledge quantity to Earth to help next-day drive selections.”
It is because the science and engineering groups want to take a look at the information coming from the rover to make selections about the place to ship it subsequent. The excellent news is that “Perseverance appears to have all of that, permitting our group to place collectively a sustained marketing campaign that has met and exceeded expectations. In a single week it has traveled about 1.5 km, successfully a fee of 1 mile per week.”
Perseverance has traveled a complete of greater than 4 miles because it landed within the Jezero crater in February final yr. You possibly can see the rover’s full progress up to now on NASA’s Perseverance location map, which additionally reveals the present location of the Ingenuity helicopter which traveled together with Perseverance to Mars.
There’s nonetheless a number of science left for Perseverance to do, however up to now the indicators are trying good for the rover to have an extended and wholesome marketing campaign. With regards to the pace of its progress, it’s already exceeding estimations.
Concerning the rover’s progress up to now, “I need to admit that I used to be way more pessimistic,” Weins wrote. “Over time I’ve seen many surprising conditions that bedeviled planetary rovers, so I are inclined to anticipate the surprising, having a ‘wait-and-see’ perspective towards new achievements. So I’m really excited to see Perseverance pull off this fast drive marketing campaign.”
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