There are many fun and interesting things on the Rover.
We interrupt your regular dose of Earth-based news about cars to bring you an interplanetary update. We are not referring to Elon Musk’s. Space-exploring Tesla Roadster It is currently much closer to Earth that Mars. NASA’s Perseverance Rover made a spectacular landing We were on the Red Planet last Wednesday, and as the photos start rolling in by the hundreds, we are discovering some pseudo-secret fun features of this car-sized Martain Explorer.
NASA claimed that there are many Easter eggs on Perseverance. But perhaps the most interesting is a small family portrait showing the Mars rovers currently present on the planet’s surface. Zooming in on NASA’s photos of the top of the Rover, we can see a small black plate with distorted renditions of five of its rovers.
The smallest rover, Sojourner, is on the left. It was part of the Pathfinder mission in 1997. They are identical twins Spirit and Opportunity which landed on Mars in 2004. Opportunity arrived three weeks earlier than Spirit, but both rovers became legends after exceeding their mission parameters in a biblical manner. The rovers were originally designed for short-distance, 90-day exploration. However, they continued to operate on Mars for many years. Spirit died in 2010, but Opportunity survived through 2018, making a three-month mission a 14-year adventure.
NASA’s super-sized space explorers are the two last rovers. Curiosity, which arrived at Gale crater on August 2012, is also an excellent explorer. Curiosity was originally slated to be a two-year mission. However, it is still active today and has had its mission extended indefinitely. Perseverance is the last rover shown in this portrait. It is just beginning its Mars mission.Perseverance is not the only thing that makes Perseverance unique. As Space.com Three microchips that contain the names and essays of almost 11 million people are attached to the rover. There are many things inscribed on the MastcamZ camera, which is mounted on the rover. These include images of humans and dinosaurs, plants, bacteria and DNA. It is a tribute to Perseverance’s primary mission, which was to find evidence of past microbial activity on Mars.
Even the descent parachute of the rover was coded with a secret message. The alternating colors represented binary code, which translated into the motto “dare to mighty things”, which is used by Perseverance. The GPS coordinates of JPL Lab were also found in the outer rings. Scientists can have fun, but who says that?
Perseverance already has nearly 5,000 images from Mars, and this was just six days ago. We are eager to see what happens next when the autonomous car embarks on its epic Martian journey.