An important development lately about NASA‘s Perseverance rover is that it has taken its first test drive on Mars. The agency announced on Friday that the rover made its first short drive on Thursday.
Perseverance, a car-sized six-wheeled rover was landed successfully on the Red Planet on February 18. It moved 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) across the Martian terrain on a drive that took about 33 minutes. The rover drives at a top speed of.01 miles per hour (.016 kilometres).
“Our first drive went incredibly well. It works beautifully. We were so excited. This is really just the beginning,” NASA’s Anais Zarifian, a Perseverance mobility testbed engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
NASA has previously said that the rover will collect rock and soil samples from Mars and send them to Earth. The mission team members also named 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.