Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA begins testing on Perseverance rover’s twin, OPTIMISM

Georgina Torbet
By
Twin of NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Moves Into New Home

NASA’s Perseverance rover is on its way to Mars, but that doesn’t mean that the rover team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is taking a break: This week, researchers have been testing a twin of the rover which stayed here on Earth, an engineering version called OPTIMISM (Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars).

Recommended Videos

There are a few important differences between OPTIMISM and Perseverance, such as power delivery. Perseverance is powered through a nuclear trickle-charged battery, while OPTIMISM has an umbilical cord that provides its power and allows the team to make a direct ethernet connection with which they can send commands and receive data.

Related

However, OPTIMISM has the same wheels, cameras, and autonomous driving capabilities as Perseverance, and it is being put through its paces with a series of driving tests at JPL. So far, it has only been tested inside a warehouse, but soon it will be taken to the “Mars Yard,” an outdoor area that simulates the martian surface.

Engineers test drive the Earth-bound twin of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover for the first time in a warehouselike assembly room at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Engineers test drive the Earth-bound twin of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover for the first time in a warehouse-like assembly room at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. NASA/JPL-Caltech

“Perseverance’s mobility team can’t wait to finally drive our test rover outside,” Anais Zarifian, the mobility test bed engineer at JPL, said in a statement. “This is the test robot that comes closest to simulating the actual mission operations Perseverance will experience on Mars — with wheels, eyes, and brains all together — so this rover is going to be especially fun to work with.”

The aim of testing the engineering version is to check performance in various settings and to ensure that any changes made to the rover, in particular regarding software updates, won’t have unexpected consequences.

“The Mars 2020 Perseverance test bed team’s motto is ‘No optimism allowed,'” Matt Stumbo, the lead for the vehicle system test bed (VSTB), said in the statement. “So we named the test rover OPTIMISM to remind us of the work we have to do to fully test the system. Our job is to find problems, not just hope activities will work. As we work through the issues with OPTIMISM, we gain confidence in Perseverance’s capabilities and confidence in our ability to operate on Mars.”

For now, testing of OPTIMISM will continue ahead of the landing of Perseverance on Mars in February next year.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
NASA stops speaking to its Mars robots, but they haven’t fallen out
NASA's Perserverance Mars rover.

NASA’s Mars robots receive their commands from the mission team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, but for the next few weeks, communications will fall silent.

This is due to that massive fireball in the sky -- aka the sun -- coming between Earth and Mars. The celestial event is known as solar conjunction and happens every couple of years.

Read more
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