NASA’s Perseverance rover snapped a scenic view of its personal tracks on Mars on Feb. 4, 2022.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
This story is a part of Welcome to Mars, our sequence exploring the purple planet.
Back in 2005, NASA’s dearly departed Opportunity rover set one heck of a document by driving 722 ft (220 meters) in a single day. At the time, NASA known as it a “seemingly long-standing” document. And stand it did. Until the Perseverance rover toppled the document final week.
NASA JPL highlighted the brand new achievement in a tweet on Monday, saying, “She achieved the longest drive in a single sol by a Martian rover (the earlier document had been held by Opportunity for practically 17 years) and surpassed her personal document of longest AutoNav drive.” A “sol” on Mars is about 24 hours and 40 minutes lengthy.
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Perseverance is a road-tripping beast, and a number of that is because of its superior auto navigation system that lets the rover make its personal choices whereas driving with out the necessity for a human to offer it precise instructions.
The rover group dropped a couple of extra particulars on the brand new document with a tweet on Feb. 5 saying, “Just set a brand new Martian document of 243.3 meters, after which yesterday, one other: 245.76 meters.” That longer distance works out to about 806 ft. That may not sound like an epic journey, however consider Perseverance is touring throughout the dusty, rock-strewn Jezero Crater.
NASA shared a view of the rover wanting again at its personal wheel tracks, and you’ll see the way it has to work with difficult terrain and huge rocks. As the Curiosity rover is aware of, Martian rocks can damage.
According to NASA, AutoNav may permit the rover to hit a high pace of 393 ft (120 meters) per hour. Compare that to the Curiosity, which is kitted out with an earlier AutoNav system that enables it to cowl roughly 66 ft (20 meters) per hour. That means Percy nonetheless has some respiration room to interrupt its personal document. As NASA mentioned, “Places to go, rocks to see!”