Technicians move a full technical version of the NASAendurance Mars Rover to its new home – a garage overlooking Mars Yard in the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California – on September 4, 2020.
This VSTB (Vehicle System Test Bed) rover was built in a warehouse-like meeting room not far from Mars Yard – an area that simulates the surface of the Red Planet – and allows the mission team to test the performance of hardware and software before issuing orders the real rover on Mars. It is also called OPTIMISM (Operational Perseverance Twin for the integration of mechanisms and instruments that are sent to Mars).
The Perseverance Rover’s astrobiology mission will look for signs of ancient microbial life. It will also characterize the climate and geology of the planet, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first planetary mission to collect and cache Martian rocks and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent missions, currently under review by NASA in collaboration with the European Space Agency, would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and bring them back to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the moon in preparation for human exploration of the red planet. NASA is slated to bring astronauts back to the moon by 2024 and establish a sustained human presence on and around the moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration plans.
JPL, which is administered by Caltech of Pasadena, California for NASA, built and manages the operation of the Perseverance rover.
For NASA Endurance, read Mars Rover’s Earth Twin Moving to New Home to learn more about this story, including a video.
Images: NASA / JPL-Caltech
