The first self-driving vehicle on Mars has proven to be a smashing success
About 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous.
About 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous.
The short version
- Sometime next week, NASA’s newest rover on Mars, Perseverance, will set a record for the most distance driven by any vehicle on another world.
- The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface.
- In doing so it will break the previous distance record held by the long-lived Opportunity rover, which ceased communications with NASA in 2018.
What happened
So how did Perseverance reach this record-setting distance in just a third of the time? “The real enabling technology has been its auto navigation system,” said Steven Lee, the project manager for the Perseverance rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an interview.
Why it matters
The Curiosity rover, largely a twin of Perseverance that launched nine years earlier, had similar imaging capability and algorithms.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.