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NASA is quite proud of its Perseverance rover on Mars, and that’s understandable.
After all, it’s been just over two weeks since the car-sized rover nailed its landing on the Red Planet to begin a multi-year mission looking for signs of ancient life. Perseverance has been busy since landing on February 18 and NASA will show how much of a press conference call is going on today (March 5).
Billed as a chance to learn more about Perseverance’s “premieres” on Mars, the NASA rover update will begin at 3:30 p.m. EST (2030 GMT). You can follow it live here and on the Space.com homepage, courtesy of NASA TV, or directly from the NASA website here. Visuals from the conference call will be streamed live on NASA’s JPL YouTube feed here.
Related: Where to find the latest Mars photos from Perseverance
“Since NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover landed at Jezero Crater on February 18, mission controllers have made substantial progress in preparing the rover for the unpaved road ahead,” NASA officials wrote in an update.
“Since landing, NASA’s largest and most sophisticated Mars rover has undergone checks on every system and subsystem and returned thousands of images of Jezero Crater,” agency officials added. . “These checks will continue in the coming days and the rover will carry out its first tests.”
Over the past two weeks, Perseverance has raised its camera mast and switched electronic eyes that have captured a stunning view of the Jezero Crater rover landing site. This week, the rover flexed its robotic arm for the first time and began testing its wheels for its first upcoming workout.
The nuclear-powered Perseverance rover is designed to search for any clues that Jezero Crater could have supported life in the ancient past. It will also collect Martian rock samples for a future mission to retrieve and deploy the first helicopter to visit another world – a small drone called Ingenuity – as it continues its mission.
Perseverance’s Mars mission is expected to last approximately one Martian year, or 686 days (nearly two Earth years). It is possible that persistence will last much longer. NASA’s Curiosity rover, on which the design of Perseverance was based, landed on Mars in 2012 on its own two-year mission and is still healthy more than eight years later.
Email Tariq Malik at [email protected] or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us on @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
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