Nasa's self-driving Perseverance Mars Rover 'takes the wheel' on crater
NASA's newest six-wheeled robot on Mars, the Perseverance rover,
is beginning an epic journey across a crater floor seeking signs of ancient
life, the US space agency announced on Thursday.
A NASA release said the rover team is deeply engaged with planning
navigation routes, drafting instructions to be beamed up, even donning special
3D glasses to help map their course.
But increasingly, the rover will take charge of the drive-by
itself, using a powerful auto-navigation system. Called AutoNav, this enhanced
system makes 3D maps of the terrain ahead, identifies hazards, and plans a
route around any obstacles without additional direction from controllers back
on Earth.
"We have a capability called 'thinking while driving,'"
said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer, rover planner, and driver at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "The rover is thinking about
the autonomous drive while its wheels are turning."
That capability, combined with other improvements, might enable
Perseverance to hit a top speed of 393 feet (120 meters) per hour; its
predecessor, Curiosity, equipped with an earlier version of AutoNav, covers
about 66 feet (20 meters) per hour as it climbs Mount Sharp to the southeast,
it added.
"We sped up AutoNav by four or five times," said Michael
McHenry, the mobility domain lead and part of JPL's team of rover planners.
"We're driving a lot farther in a lot less time than Curiosity
demonstrated."
As Perseverance begins its first science campaign on the floor of
Jezero Crater, AutoNav will be a key feature in helping get the job done.
This crater once was a lake, when, billions of years ago, Mars was wetter than
today, and Perseverance's destination is a dried-out river delta at the
crater's edge. If life ever took hold on early Mars, signs of it might be found
there. The rover will gather samples over some 9 miles (15 kilometers), then
prep the samples for collection by a future mission that would take them back
to Earth for analysis.
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