After a start to the year marked by the return of Perseverance rover towards its landing site, the latter headed west, at full speed! Thanks to its semi-autonomous navigation, it progresses several hundred meters each day. The Ingenuity helicopter meanwhile completed its 25and flight and push the limits!
The two vehicles rush towards the crater delta.
Head West!
Strange encounter a few days ago, on the left of Perseverance. The pictures were expected, and they leave no room for doubt: over there, a few hundred meters from the rover, are the descent parachute and the rear hull which protected it and helped to land on February 18 2021 in Jezero Crater. As a safety measure, and because the geological site is not of major interest, Perseverance will not go and examine it… There is indeed a minimal risk that one of the lines of its parachute gets tangled in a hub wheel, and this is to be avoided.
So, Perseverance resumes its journey, like every other day. For the past few weeks, NASA’s largest robot has only stopped for intervals of a few hours, the time to scan the landscape and examine some rocks from afar.
The rest of the time, the rover drives to reach the Jezero delta as quickly as possible. To achieve this, he must cross a large plain dotted with damaged rocks. He has already managed to pass 318 meters in one day, an all-category record on Mars. And, in its last streak, Perseverance even passed the 520 meters covered in 3 days.
Perseverance the browser
If it drives so much (8.6 kilometers to date), it is because Perseverance is equipped with the most recent tools to plan and carry out important semi-autonomous journeys. This is made possible thanks to its hardware of course (the wheels, for example, are more resistant than those of Curiosity), but also thanks to its on-board software.
Thus, every day, or before the weekend, the teams send him his “program for the day” which includes different waypoints recognized by both his inertial unit and his navigation tools based on the image. Perseverance is particularly capable of analyzing its path and deviating from its route to avoid an obstacle or potentially dangerous ground.
These algorithms have been developed with Curiosity over the past decade and can be fully exploited on Jezero Crater. There are still about 400 to 500 meters to go before arriving in an area richer in scientific targets.
March by helicopter
Not far from there, the small twin-rotor Ingenuity helicopter also continues to impress its designers. On April 8, he completed his 25and flight, with a record distance of more than 700 meters covered in 2 minutes and 41 seconds of flight!
The device is not very far from Perseverance and should catch up with it in the coming days. If they are not allowed to get too close to each other, they must not move away either, because the rover serves as a communication relay for the small helicopter of 1, 6 kg.
The teams continue to collect as much data as possible on Martian atmospheric flights. At the same time, the images from the helicopter allow them to gauge the terrain at an intermediate altitude of about ten meters.
Source : NASA
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