NASA is celebrating improving the Perseverance rover’s ability to choose its own targets as a way to accelerate science on Mars.
Without explicit direction from Earth, the rover Perseverance fired two rock targets at its SuperCam instrument in the Sun 442 (May 18) to learn more about its elemental compositions, mission scientists said in an update Tuesday (May 31) on the mission to Mars.
“Normally, when the rover team chooses the targets, the observations are not made until the next day,” said Roger Wiens, a senior SuperCam researcher and planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in a statement. a new tab). “If Perseverance chooses its own targets, it can shoot them right after a trip.
“Having the results of SuperCam can immediately alert the team of unusual compositions in time to make decisions about further analysis before the rover moves forward,” Wiens added.
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Perseverance software for target selection is called Advanced Exploration for Augmented Science Collection (AEGIS), which was developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for other rover missions, Wiens said. The software was then adapted for Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument.
“AEGIS requests that Navcam images be taken and then analyzes the images to find rocks and prioritize them for analysis based on size, brightness and various other characteristics,” Wiens said. “It then initiates a sequence in which SuperCam fires its laser to determine the chemical composition of one or two selected priority targets in Navcam images.”
AEGIS was tested for this new capability starting in March. In May, the rover also took pictures to show where the laser was used (a more recent addition to the test sequence). With this test showing success, the team plans to use AEGIS “to provide faster data on the composition of the rocks around the rover’s path,” Wiens added.
NASA’s Perseverance rover took a selfie on Mars on September 20, 2021. (Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS)
Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, and together with a helicopter called Ingenuity, it is exploring an ancient river delta in an environment that was potentially rich in microbes billions of years ago.
The rover will cache its most promising samples for a future mission that will collect the materials and send them back to Earth in the 2030s.
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