Compute · Ars Technica
The first self-driving vehicle on Mars has proven to be a smashing success
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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.
Key facts
- The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface — They were initially life-tested for 20 km of driving, but NASA is in the midst of certifying them to at least 100 km, and possibly longer
- By contrast, about 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous thanks to its (slightly) more modern Vision Compute Element
- In Jezero Crater, the rover is studying some of the most ancient rocks in the Solar System, older than any on Earth, dating as far back as about 4 billion years ago
Summary
The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. So how did Perseverance reach this record-setting distance in 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. Much like self-driving cars on Earth, Perseverance has sophisticated onboard cameras that image the surrounding terrain, and these images are then processed algorithmically by an onboard computer to calculate the safest route.