NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover stepped through its first exam drive on Mars Thursday, covering around 21 feet of the extraterrestrial landscape, the space agency said.

The versatility test is one of a huge number to scratch off Perseverance’s do-to list, as colleagues adjust each framework and instrument on the rover.

At the point when scientists choose all frameworks are go, it will start consistently driving the length of a few football fields all at once.

“With regards to wheeled vehicles on different planets, there are not many first-time occasions that measure up in importance to that of the primary drive,” said Anais Zarifian, Mars 2020 Perseverance rover portability proving ground engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“This was our first opportunity to ‘kick the tires’ and take Perseverance out for a turn. The rover’s six-wheel drive reacted sublimely. We are presently certain our drive framework is all set, equipped for taking us any place the science drives us over the course of the following two years.”

The drive endured around 33 minutes, as the rover arranged transforms and upheld up into another parking spot at an agonizingly slow clip, authorities said.

Since the Feb. eighteenth landing, mission regulators have likewise finished software updates, conveyed Perseverance’s breeze sensors and tried the rover’s 7-foot-long automated arm.

The rover is currently ready to start more confounded missions, including finding a dispatch site for its scaled down helicopter one month from now.

Scientists trust its multi-year mission will give knowledge into the locale’s geology and past climate, and decide whether life once existed on the planet.

NASA authorities expect that examples and information assembled by Perseverance will at last get ready space travelers for human investigation on Mars.

With the rover now moving, scientists memorialized its score site, casually naming it for the late science fiction author Octavia E. Butler.