New Delhi|Jagran Technology Desk| As NASA’s Perseverance rover is moving towards the red planet, the six-wheeler’s twin, called Optimism, is set to roll through a replica Martian landscape on Earth.

The US space agency has made a full-scale engineering version of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover to avoid as many unexpected issues as possible after the rover lands on February 18, 2021.

The Perseverance rover has six wheels and the engineers are expecting to take it out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California next week. NASA said, that it will be taken into the Mars Yard, the filed covered with red dirt and rocks which is similar to Mars’s surface

The US Space agency also said that the model passed its first driving test in a relatively tame warehouse like assembly room at JPL on Sept. 1.

“Perseverance’s mobility team can’t wait to finally drive our test rover outside,” said Anais Zarifian, the mobility test bed engineer at JPL. “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.”

NASA also said that the Perseverance has a fitting name, one that captures the hard work of getting the rover on its way to Mars amid a pandemic, its twin has a name, too: OPTIMISM, short for Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to 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.

And just like Perseverance has a fitting name, its twin has a name, too: OPTIMISM, short for Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars.

“Optimism” is nearly identical to Perseverance. It is the same size, has the same mobility system, top driving speed of 0.15 kph, and features the same distinctive “head”, known as the remote sensing mast.

Posted By: Deeksha Sharma