An image of the “persevering” rover on the surface of Mars. Photo: NASA / ZUMA Wire / dpa (Photo: dpa)(Photo: NASA / ZUMA Wire / dpa)
New York – The “Perseverance” Mars rover has successfully completed its first tour on the surface of Mars. According to NASA, the spacecraft covered a distance of 6.5 meters two weeks after it landed on the red planet.
The rover took 33 minutes to track on Thursday. The trip was intended as a test of perseverance (in German roughly “staying power”).
The four-wheel drive rover worked perfectly, said engineer Anis Zarifyan, a NASA engineer. We are now confident that our propulsion system is ready for use and can take us anywhere science takes us over the next two years. , The Mars rover should cover distances of about 200 meters.
The “Perseverance”, which weighs about 1,000 kilograms and the size of a small car, landed on February 18 after 203 days of flight and the 472 million kilometers it had traveled in a perilous maneuver in a dry lake on Mars. The rover will inspect this lake, which has a diameter of about 45 kilometers, over the next two years.
It took eight years to develop and build the $ 2.5 billion (about 2.2 billion euros) car. Its mission is to search for traces of past microbial life on Mars and study the planet’s climate and geology.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210306-99-710261 / 3
