On this November day, a heavy-duty vehicle transported OPTIMISM from a JPL test lab to the Mars Yard garage. “Drill into the rock, collect the core sample, and now we have the mechanism responsible to cache that sample in the cylinder.”Īnd if problems arise on Perseverance on Mars, OPTIMISM can be used as a platform to figure out what went wrong and also how to fix it. “Now we can do it end-to-end in the test bed,” said the Vehicle System Ted Bed systems engineering lead, Jose G. Some or all of these initial samples could be among those returned to Earth by a future mission. The assembly on Perseverance is responsible for storing rock and sediment samples. And while the team has already performed tests using the coring drill at the end of OPTIMISM’s robotic arm, they’ll be testing the newly installed Adaptive Caching Assembly for the first time in the Mars Yard. Download image ›īut it recently received some key updates to match features available on Perseverance, including additional mobility software and the bulk of the exquisitely complex sample caching system. 29, 2021, a heavy-duty vehicle transports the Perseverance rover’s engineering model, called OPTIMISM, from a test lab to the Mars Yard garage at JPL. OPTIMISM first rolled out into the Mars Yard in September 2020, when it conducted mobility tests. In each case, a rover double has scaled slopes, dodged obstacles, or helped rover planners puzzle out new paths on the simulated patch of Mars. It works.”Ībout as long as a doubles tennis court and twice as wide, the Mars Yard has served as a testing ground for many a fully-engineered rover twin – from the engineering model of the very first, tiny Sojourner that landed on Mars in 1997 to the Spirit and Opportunity missions that began in 2004 to the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers exploring Mars today. We’ve done so much testing on the ground we can be confident in it. What we have safely traversed around here has informed rover drivers in planning their traverses on Mars. “We test a lot of that, figure out what kinds of things to avoid. “The size and shape of rocks in the visual field – will they turn into obstacles or not?” said Bryan Martin, the flight software and test beds manager at JPL. They also could potentially reveal unexpected problems Perseverance might encounter. The tests help ensure that OPTIMISM’s twin on Mars can safely execute the commands sent by controllers on Earth. OPTIMISM Ready for Testing : OPTIMISM faces a doorway of JPL’s Mars Yard garage shortly after arriving there on Oct. Short for Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars, OPTIMISM is more generically known as a vehicle system test bed, and the recently upgraded rover begins testing out new equipment for the first time this month. OPTIMISM, a twin of the Perseverance rover that is exploring Jezero Crater on Mars, will perform a crucial job in the weeks ahead: navigating the Mars Yard’s slopes and hazards, drilling sample cores from boulders, and storing the samples in metal tubes – just like Perseverance is doing in its hunt for signs of ancient microbial life. And the landscape was a boulder-strewn mock-up of the real Mars – the Mars Yard at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. But this rover, named OPTIMISM, wasn’t on the Red Planet. On a recent day in November, the car-size rover rolled slowly forward, then stopped, perched on the threshold of a Martian landscape. OPTIMISM, the full-scale engineering model of Perseverance, begins a series of rigorous tests to assess the risk of potential driving hazards on the surface of the Red Planet.
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