The first geologists on Mars, Yeh, right no humans of flesh and bone, but robot automatons of metal and wheels and now nearing the third anniversary of their landings and Hey, they are getting smarter as they get older. Yeh, you guessed it right, me talking about NASA’s twin Mars rovers... What? You guys look freaked out. Oh, that rover getting smarter? Yes, that’s right the mars rovers are getting smarter with the passage of time not because they now know the Martian topography better than any body else but because they are now testing four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers.
What are the four new skills?
One of the new capabilities enables spacecraft to examine images and recognize certain types of features. It is based on software developed for NASA’s Space Technology 6 “thinking spacecraft.”
Both rovers have photographed dozens of dusty whirlwinds in action, and clouds. Until now, however, scientists on Earth have had to sift through many transmitted images from Mars to find those few. With the new intelligence boost, the rovers can recognize dust devils or clouds and select only the relevant parts of those images to send back to Earth. This increased efficiency will free up more communication time for additional scientific investigations.
Another new feature, called “visual target tracking,” enables a rover to keep recognizing a designated landscape feature as the rover moves. This means bang on target or in other words the rover won’t miss the feature that it is looking at from different angels. It may be a rock that looks bigger as the rover approaches it, or maybe the shape looks different from a different angle, but the rover still knows it’s the same rock.
‘Visual target tracking’ can be combined with a third new feature — autonomy in calculating where it is safe to reach out with the contact tools on the rover’s robotic arm. The combination gives Spirit and Opportunity a capability called “go and touch,” which is yet to be tested on Mars. So far in the mission, whenever a rover has driven to a new location, the crew on Earth has had to evaluate images of the new location to decide where the rover could place its contact instruments on a subsequent day. After the new software has been tested and validated, the crew will have the option of letting a rover choose an arm target for itself the same day it drives to a new location.
The new software also improves the autonomy of each rover for navigating away from hazards by building better maps of their surroundings than they have done previously. All in all one can say the robotic field geologists for Mars have everything that you would find in the toolkit of the field geologist on Earth. This means get ready for more not more, better information from our next home.
Via: RedOrbit
