Making Tracks to the Delta

Perseverance is in a drive campaign going faster than any previous rover. How fast, you may ask? Its actual speed is just under a tenth of a mile per hour, but it’s faster than its predecessors. It is making comparatively rapid progress by devoting several hours per day to driving on very smooth terrain.

That has allowed Perseverance to break previous rovers’ records for the distance traveled in one day, now standing at 319.8 m, the distance it traveled on Sol 351. Curiosity made a number of drives over 100 meters, but none over 200 meters.

That was due in part to rockier terrain. Like Perseverance, Opportunity, which landed way back in 2004, had some very smooth patches of terrain, allowing it to travel up to 228 meters in one day using solar power just a year after its landing.

Overall, it’s not just the single-day drive that matters; it is more difficult to put together a continuous campaign. That requires enough energy, enough time in the day, and enough data volume to Earth to support next-day drive decisions. Perseverance seems to have all of that, allowing our team to put together a sustained campaign that has met and exceeded expectations.

In one week it has traveled about 1.5 km, effectively a rate of one mile per week. As of Friday, March 25, 2022, which was Sol 389, Perseverance had driven a total of 6.6 km (4.1 miles). You can watch the progress of Perseverance here.

I must admit that I was much more pessimistic. Over the years I have seen many unexpected situations that bedeviled planetary rovers, so I tend to expect the unexpected, having a “wait-and-see” attitude toward new achievements. So I am truly excited to see Perseverance pull off this rapid drive campaign. In terms of overall distance, Perseverance has a lot left if it wants to catch up with Opportunity (45 km) or Curiosity (over 27 km). I believe Perseverance will eventually surpass these other rovers, but we’ll have to wait and see.

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Sample Tally for the Crater Floor Campaign

Pasadena CA (JPL) Mar 29, 2022

Perseverance has spent a little over one Earth year in Jezero crater. In the last week, the team reached a very special milestone as we officially completed our first science campaign focused on the Jezero crater floor.

During our crater floor campaign, we kept Perseverance busy! As we learned more about our surroundings, we characterized the rocks that make up the crater floor into two formations, both of which we believe to be igneous in origin. A formation is a geologic term for a sequence of r … read more

Tags: Mars