NASA's Perseverance Rover Goes Through Trials by Fire, Ice, Light and Sound

While auto manufacturers built over 92 million motor vehicles for this world in 2019, NASA built just one for Mars. The Perseverance Mars rover is one of a kind, and the testing required to get it ready to roll on the mean (and unpaved) streets of the Red Planet is one of a kind as well.

Because hardware cannot be repaired once the rover is on Mars, the team has to build a vehicle that can survive for years on a planet with punishing temperature shifts, constant radiation and ever-present dust. To ensure readiness, they put Perseverance through a test program tougher than the trip to Mars and the environment it will encounter once there.

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Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This animated GIF shows the deployment of the Perseverance rover's remote sensing mast during a cold test in a space simulation chamber at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The test took place in October 2019.

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"Mars is hard, and everybody knows that," said project manager John McNamee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "What they may not realize is that to be successful at Mars, you have to test the absolute heck out of the thing here on Earth."

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