Watch a Mars Rover Practice Its First Steps

The European Space Agency's ExoMars 2018 rover isn't scheduled to launch for a few years yet, but the team is already practicing its first steps for when it touches down on the Red Planet.

ESA just released this time-lapse video of new rover tests. The machine in the tests isn't the real ExoMars rover; it's a half-scale version for the purpose of testing.

The video shows the rover making what would be its first tentative trundles in space. These first movements won't technically be on the Martian surface; the initial rolls of the rover's six wheels need to take it off its lander and onto the planet's solid ground so it can start its mission.

It's one small crawl for a rover, but ESA describes this egress as "the second most stressful moment of the mission after Mars landing."

In the tests, they tried to replicate some of the challenges that make the egress so difficult. The rover was placed in a random spot in the "Mars Yard"—an artificial Marscape at France's National Centre for Space Studies (CNES)—while the researchers controlling it were 1,000 km away in the Netherlands. They could only use the rover's sensors to decide where and how to move it off its lander, and they could only communicate with it to send commands once an hour (on Mars, this will be restricted to once or twice a day).

They did five practice runs, of which one failed—ESA writes that "the rover descended down at too steep an angle and began to topple off."

That's not a mistake they can make on the real run. When the rover (hopefully) reaches its newly-selected landing site on Mars, it will collect data and drill for samples. The ExoMars mission, which also includes contributions from Russian space agency Roscosmos, has one main goal: search for signs of life.

With an announcement scheduled from NASA today regarding its MAVEN mission, a Mars orbiter exploring the planet's atmosphere, perhaps we'll soon have more of an idea of what it should look for on the ground.