NASA’s Mars rover went off its landing position two weeks after first reaching the red planet in a 33-minute drive.
The rover went four meters, took a left step by 150 degrees, and then backed up 2.5 meters in his test.
“This is really the beginning of our journey here,” said Rich Rieber, the NASA engineer who plotted the orbit.
“This is going to be like the Odyssey, events on the way, hopefully not Cyclops, and I’m sure there will be plenty of stories written about it.”
Flight controllers are still monitoring Perseverance systems and everything is working so far.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see wheel tracks and I’ve seen a lot of them,” said engineer Anais Zarifian.
The plan for the rover is to gather rocks at an old river delta. But before that he will release an experimental helicopter with the name Ingenuity that he took with him.
Persistence is still NASA’s largest and most complete rover and became the ninth U.S. spacecraft to successfully land on Mars on February 18th.
NASA scientists, meanwhile, announced Friday that they have named the Perseverance city in honor of the late science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who grew up next door to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA in Pasadena, California.
She was one of the first African Americans to receive mainstream attention for science fiction.