Yesterday, the Mars Rover Curiosity completed its first test drive. It hasn’t moved very far and at the end it was about 6 meters (about 20 feet) away from the point where it landed on Mars. During this test it moved forward, reverse and turning combining the various movements.
Yesterday, NASA also announced that it officially named the Mars Rover Curiosity’s landing site Bradbury Landing after the great writer Ray Bradbury, who passed away last June and yesterday would’ve turned 92. “The Martian Chronicles” are one of the masterpieces of this writer, to honor him in this way was the least they could do.
The mobility of the wheels was already tested in the past few days but yesterday the Mars Rover Curiosity actually moved. It seems a trivial event but this rover is much bigger and more sophisticated of the previous ones so it took two weeks to test this system and it will take several more days to complete all the thorough tests. Performing such a task from another planet isn’t easy but it’s essential to make sure that the many Curiosity’s components work but also to see how the rover behaves in the actual Martian conditions.
The arrival of the Mars Rover Curiosity on the Red Planet was a success but during its systems tests a damage was discovered to one of the sensors of the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), the weather station, which was supposed to measure the speed of wind.
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It’s impossible to be sure of the cause of the damage but probably during the landing some piece of rock raised by Curiosity’s impact hit some component of the sensor and damaged it. It’s not a particularly serious loss because another wind detecting sensor works but of course all of the data that will be recorded can be useful so there’s a certain sadness for this damage.
Luckily, the Mars Rover Curiosity’s mobility system has fully passed the test. Therefore it can start moving towards the closest targets while the last tests should be completed in the next few days. Curiosity will remain for a while at Bradbury Landing then it will start its real journey and the real Martian Chronicles.
