Source : Perth Now news
NASA’s robotic Perseverance rover has now driven farther than any other vehicle on the surface of any world other than Earth.
The US space agency said on Tuesday that the car-sized, six-wheeled rover had racked up 45.2 km since arriving on Mars in 2021.
Its mission has been to explore if conditions conducive to microbial life ever existed on Earth’s neighbour.
In doing so, it is visiting some of the most ancient terrain ever encountered in the solar system.
“Perseverance’s engineering hardware and instruments are in excellent shape with all redundant systems still available,” project manager Steven Lee told Reuters.
“A recent assessment of all systems concluded that they are capable of operating well into the 2030s, likely beyond.”
Perseverance has exceeded the previous figure of 45km driven on the Martian surface by NASA’s Opportunity rover from 2004 to 2018.
Both also exceeded the driving distances of any lunar rover.
Perseverance, with its suite of scientific instruments, has focused on the Jezero Crater, a region in the northern hemisphere of Mars believed to have been flooded with water and home to a lake basin billions of years ago.
The rover set the distance milestone in a journey towards an area called Idubi, through the region off the crater’s western rim nicknamed Lac de Charmes.
Its companion rover, Curiosity, rolls along in the Gale Crater near the Martian equator.
Perseverance’s mobility system mechanisms are being tested to show it can drive 100km or more, Lee said, with the hardware to be tested to the equivalent of 150km to 300km in the effort.
NASA attributed a major role in Perseverance’s success to its self-driving capability.
Lee said 90 per cent of its drives were done autonomously, with no human intervention.
“Perseverance takes stereo images of the terrain ahead, generates a 3D software map and selects the safest path towards a drive goal,” he said.
Lee said the rover’s biggest achievement was almost certainly its discovery, unveiled in 2025, of a potential biosignature, or possible sign of ancient microbial life.
This was found in reddish rock believed to have formed 3.2 billion to 3.8 billion years ago in a river channel feeding the lake that once filled Jezero Crater.
