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

NASA begins testing on Perseverance rover’s twin, OPTIMISM

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.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

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 has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
How NASA is using AI on the Perseverance rover to study Mars rocks
akdjf alkjdhf lk

Space engineers have been using AI in rovers for some time now -- hence why today's Mars explorers are able to pick a safe landing site and to drive around a region autonomously. But something they haven't been able to do before now is to do science themselves, as most of that work is done by scientists on Earth who analyze data and point the rover toward targets they want to investigate.

Now, though, NASA's Perseverance rover is taking the first steps toward autonomous science investigation on Mars. The rover has been testing out an AI capability for the last three years, which allows it to search for and identify particular minerals in Mars rocks. The system works using the rover's PIXL instrument (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), a spectrometer that uses light to analyze what rocks are made of. The software, called adaptive sampling, looks though PIXL's data and identifies minerals to be studied in more detail.

Read more
NASA axes its moon rover project VIPER
NASA’s VIPER – short for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover – sits assembled inside the cleanroom at the agency’s Johnson Space Center.

NASA’s VIPER -- short for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover -- sits assembled inside the cleanroom at the agency’s Johnson Space Center. NASA

NASA has announced it is scrapping its plans to send a rover to the moon. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, project was intended to search the moon's polar regions for water, but will now be shelved due to budget issues. Originally slated to land on the moon in December 2022, the project had been delayed several times, and the most recent update was that it would not be ready until September 2025.

Read more
Venus gets a taste of Missy Elliot in NASA communications test
This illustration of the large Quetzalpetlatl Corona located in Venus’ southern hemisphere depicts active volcanism and a subduction zone, where the foreground crust plunges into the planet’s interior.

This illustration of the large Quetzalpetlatl Corona located in Venus’ southern hemisphere depicts active volcanism and a subduction zone, where the foreground crust plunges into the planet’s interior. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Peter Rubin

In space, they say, no one can hear your scream -- but at certain points in our solar system, you might be able to pick up some Missy Elliot. NASA has recently made special use of its communication system, called the Deep Space Network, by sending the lyrics of Missy Elliot's song The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly) to Venus.

Read more