NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced on yesterday that “a full-scale engineering version of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover — outfitted with wheels, cameras, and powerful computers to help it drive autonomously — has just moved into its garage home at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. This rover model passed its first driving test in a relatively tame warehouse-like assembly room at JPL on Sept. 1, 2020. Engineers expect to take it out next week into the Mars Yard, where a field of red dirt studded with rocks and other obstacles simulates the Red Planet’s surface.”
Perseverance’s earthly twin is named OPTIMISM. (No doubt here that JPL chose its technical name to produce the acronym desired: the “Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars”!) JPL notes that the motto of the Perseverance test bed team has been “no optimism allowed”; everything must be fully tested—and OPTIMISM is designed to do that.
OPTIMISM is needed because “Perseverance isn’t flying to Mars with a mechanic. To avoid as many unexpected issues as possible after the rover lands on Feb. 18, 2021, the team needs this Earth-bound vehicle system test bed (VSTB) rover to gauge how hardware and software will perform before they transmit commands up to Perseverance on Mars. This rover model will be particularly useful for completing a full set of software tests so the team can send up patches while Perseverance is en route to Mars or after it has landed,” JPL explains.
