Endurance made a driving test.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Mars is not a friendly place for machines. It is ate a lot of our robots alive. But NASA’s Perseverance Rover is up to the challenge after going through a series of brutal tests here at home.
“Mars is tough, and everyone knows that.” Project manager John McNamee said in a NASA release on Monday. “What you may not realize is that to be successful on Mars you have to test the absolute problem here on Earth.”
NASA shared a summary of the rover’s attempts with a video of its biggest hits, including spin, shake, solar, heat, and drive tests. Spoiler alert: it passed all of them.
Persistence is planned to start on Mars in July. It will reach the red planet in February 2021, where it will look for signs of old life and examine Mars rocks and soils. It will even release a helicopter, a technology demonstration that could change the way we explore other worlds.
So far it has been a tough road. The rover was blasted with sound waves, immersed in intense light, cooled in freezing temperatures, exposed to the thin atmospheric conditions and put through its paces on uneven surfaces. After all, Mars could feel like a vacation.
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