The Full-Scale Perseverance Twin That Plans the Drive on Mars

Perseverance is not the only copy. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the mission team keeps OPTIMISM — the Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars — a full-scale engineering model used to plan the rover's driving routes and science activities on Mars. The mission team gathered in the JPL Mars Yard with a Guinness World Records certificate marking the rover distance record on the Red Planet. The record is the headline; the stand-in is the method. Route planning for a machine on another planet happens first on a facsimile standing in a yard.