Icon: enlarge
Rover "Perseverance" on Mars
Photo: NASA / dpa
The “Perseverance” rover has successfully completed its first tour on Mars.
According to NASA information on Friday, the vehicle covered a distance of 6.5 meters two weeks after landing on the Red Planet - and took a good 33 minutes on Thursday.
The trip was intended as a test for Perseverance (in German roughly “staying power”).
"The rover's six-wheel drive worked perfectly," said NASA engineer Anais Zarifian.
"We are now confident that our propulsion system is operational and can take us anywhere science takes us over the next two years."
Explore weather and geology
In order to carry out scientific experiments, the Mars vehicle will drive distances of around 200 meters, looking for traces of earlier microbial life and researching the planet's climate and geology.
The rover will also take samples of rocks and dust.
Scientists hope that the mission will provide new insights into the origin of the universe.
"Perseverance" weighs around 1,000 kilograms and is the size of a small car.
Development and construction of the approximately 2.5 billion dollars (about 2.2 billion euros) vehicle had taken eight years.
On February 18, after 203 days of flight and 472 million kilometers traveled, the rover landed in a risky maneuver in a dry lake on Mars.
The rover will examine the lake with a diameter of around 45 kilometers over the next two years.
Secret code in the parachute
After landing, Internet users discovered a hidden message in the parachute with which the rover sailed to Mars: an irregular pattern of red and white stripes could be seen on video recordings.
This could be a binary code like the one used on computers.
Red corresponds to 1, white to 0 and each of the four rings of the parachute corresponds to a word.
In the parachute it says »DARE MIGHTY THINGS«, in English »Big dare«.
That is the motto of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which builds satellites and probes for NASA.
The geographic coordinates of the JPL are also stored (read more about decoding the code here).
Icon: The mirror
jme / dpa