NASA's Mars 2020 comes full circle
Published Date: 9/13/2019
Source: phys.org
Engineers took NASA's Mars 2020 for a spin on Aug. 29, 2019. The 2,300-pound (1,040-kilogram) Martian vehicle was rotated clockwise and counterclockwise at about 1 revolution per minute on what is called a spin table in the clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (The rotation was sped up in the video above.) The engineers were looking for the rover's center of gravity, or the point at which weight is evenly dispersed on all sides.