NASA’s new Mars rover hits the dusty red road

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA’s new Mars rover hit the dusty red road this week, putting 21 feet on the odometer on its first test drive.

The Perseverance rover ventured from its landing position Thursday, two weeks after touching down on the Red Planet to look for signs of past life.

The roundabout, back and forth only lasted 33 minutes and went so smoothly that more driving was available on Friday and Saturday for the six-wheel rover.

“This really is the start of our journey here,” said Rich Rieber, the NASA engineer who plotted the route. “It’s going to be like the Odyssey, adventures along the way, hopefully no Cyclops, and I’m sure there will be a lot of stories written about it.”

On its first run, Perseverance advanced 13 feet, took a 150-degree left turn, then retreated 8 feet. During a press conference on Friday, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Shared photos of its tracks on and around small rocks.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see the wheel tracks and I’ve seen a lot of them,” said engineer Anais Zarifian.

Flight controllers always check all Perseverance systems. So far everything looks good. The rover’s 7-foot robot arm, for example, flexed its muscles for the first time on Tuesday.

Before the car-sized rover can head to an ancient river delta to collect rocks for eventual return to Earth, it must drop its so-called protective “belly pan” and release a experimental helicopter named Ingenuity.

In the end, Perseverance landed right on the edge of a potential helicopter airstrip – a nice flat spot, according to Rieber. So the plan is to get off that airstrip, ditch the pan, and then come back for Ingenuity’s highly anticipated test flight. All of this should be accomplished in late spring.

Scientists wonder whether to take the smoother route to get to the nearby delta or perhaps a more difficult route with intriguing remnants of that once watery era 3-4 billion years ago.

Perseverance – NASA’s largest and most sophisticated rover to date – became the ninth U.S. spacecraft to successfully land on Mars on February 18. China hopes to land its smallest rover – currently orbiting the Red Planet – in a few months.

NASA scientists, meanwhile, announced on Friday that they had named the Perseverance touchdown site in honor of the late science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who grew up next to JPL in Pasadena. She was one of the first African American women to receive mainstream attention for science fiction. His works included “Bloodchild and Other Stories” and “Parable of the Sower”.

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