Skip to main content

Track NASA’s Perseverance rover on its journey to Mars with this simulator

If you want to check in on NASA’s Perseverance rover, launched this week on its journey to Mars, there’s a NASA simulator that you can use to follow along with the mission’s progress.

Using NASA’s Eyes software, you can see a simulated view of the Mars 2020 spacecraft in real time as it travels on its journey. And if you zoom out to the Terran system and solar system views, you can see where the craft is in relation to the rest of the solar system, with the orbits of the planets including Mars and Earth shown.

The map also shows where other NASA missions are located as well, so in the Terran system, you can see objects such as the planet-hunting telescope TESS. If you zoom out even further to view the inner solar system, you can see the position of objects like the Parker Solar Probe, the Bennu spacecraft, and the metal asteroid and target of a future mission, Psyche. Clicking on the names of these objects or the planets will bring up statistics about each one and links of where to find more information.

If you continue to zoom out even further, you can see where the sun and our solar system are located within the Milky Way — and you also get some idea of just how large the distances between stellar systems are.

According to NASA, Perseverance has approximately 290 million miles still to go on its journey to Mars, which is expected to take until February 2021.

There were some concerns about the spacecraft on the day of its launch as NASA experienced a minor communications issue and the craft automatically went into safe mode as it experienced cold temperatures while in the shadow of the Earth. But the craft is now out of safe mode and operating as normal, and the communications were able to be established as required using the Deep Space Network. So Perseverance is healthy and happy and everything looks on track for its journey to Mars.

“With safe mode exit, the team is getting down to the business of interplanetary cruise,” Mars 2020 deputy project manager Matt Wallace of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a blog post. “Next stop, Jezero Crater.”

Editors' Recommendations

Georgina Torbet
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Perseverance rover catches footage of a dust devil on Mars
mars 2020 perseverance rover

Many of the weather events we experience here on Earth can be found on other planets too, and that includes whirlwinds. Several missions have observed small whirlwinds called dust devils on Mars, and the Perseverance rover recently captured footage of one such dust devil in action as it rolled across the martian surface.

The footage was captured by one of Perseverance's black-and-white navigation cameras, called Navcams, and shows a dust devil moving at a speed of around 12 mph across a regions known as the Thorofare Ridge. You can clearly see the dust devil as a white column moving across the top of the ridge in an animation posted by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the rover.

Read more
NASA’s Mars rover uses its self-driving smarts to navigate toughest route
A composite image showing Perseverance’s path through a dense section of boulders.

A composite image, annotated at JPL using visualization software, showing Perseverance’s path through a dense section of boulders. The pale blue line indicates the course of the center of the front wheel hubs, while darker blue lines show the paths of the rover’s six wheels. NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Mars rover, Perseverance, has used its self-driving smarts to successfully navigate its most challenging route since arriving on the planet two-and-a-half years ago. Even better, its advanced technology meant it took just a third of the time that it would’ve taken other NASA Mars rovers.

Read more
Remarkable imagery shows NASA probe as it’s hit by a solar storm
A mid-level solar flare that peaked at 8:13 p.m. EDT on Oct. 1, 2015, captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

A NASA spacecraft captured incredible imagery as it flew through an eruption from the sun recently. Pictures beamed back to scientists on Earth even show the fiery ejection "vacuuming up" space dust left over from the formation of the solar system.

The fly-through by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe took place on September 5 and NASA shared the imagery (below) on Monday.

Read more