NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is trying to cover more distance in a single month than any other rover before it. On the path ahead are sandpits, craters, and fields of sharp rocks that the rover will have to navigate on its own. At the end of the journey, Perseverance will reach an ancient river delta, where a lake existed billions of years ago.
One of the best places on Mars for the rover to look for signs of past life is this delta. Perseverance is using a drill on the end of its robotic arm and a complex sample collection system in its belly to collect rocks for return to Earth.
Ken Farley of Caltech, Perseverance's project scientist, said that they decided to minimize science activities and focus on driving to get there more quickly. The closer we get, the more impressive those images will be.
The science team will use the instruments on Perseverance's arm to look for the rocks they want to study in closer detail. They will look for the best routes the rover can take to reach the high point.
Perseverance is needed to get there. The rover will rely on its self-driving system to set new distance records. Perseverance has the most advanced self- driving abilities of any Mars rover.
Mark Maimone, a veteran rover planner and flight software developer for NASA, said that self-driving processes that took minutes on a rover like Opportunity happen in less than a second on Perseverance.
How rover planning works.
Perseverance has 14 people who trade off shifts who write the driving commands for the robotic explorer before the rover rolls. Perseverance sends back data to the planners so they can confirm the progress of the rover. A recent drive that spanned 1,673 feet (510 meters) and included thousands of individual rover commands required multiple days to complete.
Some drives need more human input than others. For instance, large rocks and slopes are easy for the rover to detect and work around, which is why autonav is useful for drives over flat terrain.
The driver is thinking while driving.
Self-driving tools were previously developed for NASA's rovers. Perseverance to take and process images while on the move is what is different for Auto Nav. The rover uses those images to navigate. Is the boulder too close? Will its belly be able to clear that rock? What if the wheels slipped?
The upgraded hardware allows thinking while driving. Perseverance can process its route in real-time because of the faster cameras. Perseverance has an additional computer dedicated to image processing. A field-programmable gate array is great for computer vision processing and is used in the computer.
Maimone said that autonomy meant slowing down because data had to be processed on a single computer.
Humans are not completely out of the picture during autonav drives. The basic route is still planned using images taken from space. They mark obstacles such as potential sand traps for Perseverance to avoid, drawing and keeping out zones that help it navigate.
Perseverance has a sense of space.
The rover is kept in a safety bubble that is 16 feet wide. If it spots two rocks that are 15 feet apart, it will stop and travel around them rather than risk passing through them.
Perseverance has a virtual box on each of the six wheels. The newest rover on Mars can get around boulders on its own.
Maimone said that when they first looked at Jezero Crater, they were concerned about the dense fields of rocks.
The science team has the ability to zip to the locations they prioritize the most with the help of Autonav. The primary objective of the mission is to find the samples that scientists will eventually want to return to Earth.
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