NASA’s Record-Setting Perseverance Rover Team

What happened

Description Members of NASA’s Perseverance Mars mission team gather in the Mars Yard at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California with a certificate from Guinness World Records marking the rover distance record on the Red Planet. Positioned in front of the team is OPTIMISM (Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars), a full-scale engineering model used to plan the rover (a vehicle that drives across another world’s surface)’s driving routes and science activities on Mars. NASA JPL, which is managed by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. NASA is a space exploration and public company founded in 1958.