MER 2003/Athena Update Week Ending November 9, 2002

There’s a lot of news this week, both good and bad, but it all pales
in comparison to the really big news: We just took one of our rovers
for its first drive this week.

This wasn’t the FIDO rover, and it wasn’t an engineering model
either. This was the real deal… he MER-2 rover that’s going to
Mars. We put it on some blue mats in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility
at JPL, and put it through its paces: straight-line drives forward
and backward, up and down ramps, turns, and a pirouette-like spin in
place.

It’s hard to describe how it felt to watch our first flight rover go
for its first drive. It was a very emotional experience. The drive
took place five years to the day after NASA first let our science
team know that we were going to do this mission. It has been a very
long and difficult road since then to get to where we are today.

After the driving was over, it was time for a historic photo op.
Check out this picture. It’s a mother-and-child family portrait of
JPL Mars rovers, showing both MER-2 and a copy of the famous
Sojourner rover from the Mars Pathfinder mission. The MER rovers were
built using everything we learned from Sojourner, of course. So it’s
the little one in front that’s the mother, and the great big one
behind it that’s the brand-new baby.