NASA Cut Its Perseverance Rover Loose For The First Time
NASA Has Taken The Training Wheels Off Its New Perseverance Rover, Allowing It To Begin Exploring The Martian Surface Using Its Self-Driving System
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NASA’s Perseverance Rover has called Mars home for over four months already, but it’s only just now being given permission to explore on its own. The rover’s AI-powered self-driving programs are now officially up and running, and NASA can now sit back (to an extent) and watch as the rover makes its way across the Martian landscape at a speed far greater than any rover before it.
Like NASA’s previous rover, Curiosity, Perseverance is equipped with a suite of sensors, motors, and computers that allow it to drive itself across the surface of the Red Planet while avoiding obvious obstacles. Curiosity, which has already outlived its expected lifespan by a large margin, used its self-driving system in many scenarios, including during its ongoing trek up the side of Mount Sharp, a massive mountain located in the crater where Curiosity landed many years ago.
As NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains in a new blog post, the “AutoNav” self-driving system that is built into Perseverance is now “behind the wheel,” so to speak. Like its predecessor, Perseverance intelligently avoids obstacles in its path, but it does so at a much faster rate than Curiosity. More advanced systems built into the new rover allow NASA’s rover handlers to speed up the AutoNav system by up to five times. That’s a massive speed increase, and it means that Perseverance can cover nearly 400 feet per hour compared to Curiosity’s top speed of around 66 feet per hour.
Off And Running
Being able to send powerful machines packed with advanced instruments to Mars is great, but those perks often come at the expense of speed. Every rover has a finite lifespan, and once a rover touches down on the Red Planet its days are numbered. NASA does a good job of directing its landers and rovers to locations that are of interest from a scientific standpoint, but the faster a rover moves, the easier it is to travel to new areas and make new discoveries.
“We’re going to be able to get to places the scientists want to go much more quickly,” Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance rover project manager, said in a statement. “Now we are able to drive through these more complex terrains instead of going around them: It’s not something we’ve been able to do before.”
Of course, exploring isn’t the only thing the Perseverance rover is good at. As it continues to travel over the dusty crust of the planet it will take Mars surface samples. As it gathers these precious bits of material it will package and prepare them for future missions to pick up and send back to Earth. Eventually, those samples will be studied by scientists here at home, but that will be many years from now.
Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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