Mars Daily Facts Part 2
A look at Mars’s Rover, your future companion when the game launch.
Mars’s one of the most explored planets in our solar system, and It’s the only place where we’ve sent Rovers to roam and explore the alien landscapes. So, what are “Rovers”? And what’s their purpose in discovering planets, stars beside our home?
👉 A Rover, in particular to the subject — “Mars Rover”, is an exploring vehicle — a “planetary surface exploration” device which was designed to move across the solid surface of Mars or other planetary-mass celestial bodies. They examine the territories of planets, observe all the possibilities of the planet they were sent to and return what they’ve learnt in images back to their headquarters at space stations on Earth. For any source of the electrical energy problem, these Artificial Intelligence (AI) robotic machines operate by Solar Power which as shown in their Solar Panels design, thus these machines are developed to automatically place themselves in sunny spots on certain planets to replenish their power, and advance their own robotic behavior for better experimental observance.
There have been five Rovers sent to Mars.
✈️ The first Rover was sent to Mars for observance task was Sojourner. It was launched on the planet on the 4th of December of the year 1996 and landed on Mars in 1997. Sojourner weighs 25.4 lbs (about… 11kg), it costs 25 million dollars for its whole operating system, and it had driven for 100 meters in 3 months before it lost contact with its headquarters and become status unknown since then.
✈️✈️ The second launch was a batch of twin Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. These two worth 400 million USD/each. They were sent to Mars one month after another in the year 2003 (only 7 years after their predecessor, Sojourner). Both have the same weight of 374lbs/each (about 170kg/each), and they were designed to be a pair of twins AI that carry the same task. 😭 However their fate didn’t last long, Spirit lost contact with its headquarters on earth in 2010, and on the 25th of May of the year 2011, Nasa concluded its mission as Mars explorer. Spirit had traveled 806.3ft (about 246 meters) on the vast deserted world of the red planet. Its younger brother, Opportunity, despite meeting the same fate, it was trophied as the most loyal and most contributed robot ever to roam Mars — serving as an explorer for nearly 15 years and had discovered 28.06 miles (about 45.16km) of Mars’s landscape before shutting down due to a massive dust storm, which covered its Solar Panels and slowly caused its battery to die out.
Opportunity’s final message to mankind was “My battery is low, and it’s getting dark”. 😢
✈️ The Fourth Rover that was sent to Mars was Curiosity. It was launched on the 26th of November of the year 2011 and landed on Mars in the year 2012. The robot weighs almost a ton (about 900kg). It cost 2.5 billion dollars to build. It had traveled for 17.44 miles (about 28.06km), yet the Rover’s still operational to this day, making it the second most contributed space robot ever launched onto Mars.
✈️ The fifth and youngest Rover was Perseverance or Percy. It was launched in 2020 and landed on Mars in the first month of 2021. Percy’s undeniably the biggest and the bulkiest vehicle robot that mankind has ever sent to Mars. It weighs slightly over 1 ton. It costs a total of 2.7 billion dollars to fully developed before operating on its task. And for its price, the Rover had settled a ground-breaking travel distance by traveling over 200 meters in just a single day (that to be specific, was around 806.3 in feet, and 245.7 in meters) and achieved 10.27km (6.38 miles) distance in a year, making it the most anticipated Mars Rover that humanity has ever made.
And in addition to all those pieces of information on Perseverance, NASA had sent an AI companion to help with exploring Mars, called Ingenuity, a drone-sized helicopter.
Credit to all these pieces of information: Mars.nasa.gov
- Wikipedia
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Please stay tuned for another episode of daily facts 🧐.
