[meteorite-list] NASA'S Mars Curiosity Debuts Autonomous Navigation

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 15:43:45 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201308272243.r7RMhj7a028596_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-259

NASA'S Mars Curiosity Debuts Autonomous Navigation
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
August 27, 2013

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has used autonomous
navigation for the first time, a capability that lets the rover decide
for itself how to drive safely on Mars.

This latest addition to Curiosity's array of capabilities will help the
rover cover the remaining ground en route to Mount Sharp, where
geological layers hold information about environmental changes on
ancient Mars. The capability uses software that engineers adapted to
this larger and more complex vehicle from a similar capability used by
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, which is also currently
active on Mars.

Using autonomous navigation, or autonav, Curiosity can analyze images it
takes during a drive to calculate a safe driving path. This enables it
to proceed safely even beyond the area that the human rover drivers on
Earth can evaluate ahead of time.

On Tuesday, Aug. 27, Curiosity successfully used autonomous navigation
to drive onto ground that could not be confirmed safe before the start
of the drive. This was a first for Curiosity. In a preparatory test last
week, Curiosity plotted part of a drive for itself, but kept within an
area that operators had identified in advance as safe.

"Curiosity takes several sets of stereo pairs of images, and the rover's
computer processes that information to map any geometric hazard or rough
terrain," said Mark Maimone, rover mobility engineer and rover driver at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The rover considers
all the paths it could take to get to the designated endpoint for the
drive and chooses the best one."

The drive on Tuesday, the mission's 376th Martian day, or "sol," took
Curiosity across a depression where ground-surface details had not been
visible from the location where the previous drive ended. The drive
included about 33 feet (10 meters) of autonomous navigation across
hidden ground as part of a day's total drive of about 141 feet (43 meters).

"We could see the area before the dip, and we told the rover where to
drive on that part. We could see the ground on the other side, where we
designated a point for the rover to end the drive, but Curiosity figured
out for herself how to drive the uncharted part in between," said JPL's
John Wright, a rover driver.

Curiosity is nearly two months into a multi-month trek from the
"Glenelg" area, where it worked for the first half of 2013, to an entry
point for the mission's major destination: the lower layers of a
3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mound called Mount Sharp.

The latest drive brought the distance traveled since leaving Glenelg to
0.86 mile (1.39 kilometers). The remaining distance to the Mount Sharp
entry point is about 4.46 miles (7.18 kilometers) along a "rapid transit
route." That route was plotted on the basis of images from the High
Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter. The actual driving route, which will be based on
images from Curiosity's own cameras, could be longer or shorter.

Curiosity's science team has picked a few waypoints along the rapid
transit route to Mount Sharp where driving may be suspended for a few
days for science. The rover has about 0.31 mile (500 meters) left to go
before reaching the first of these waypoints, which appears from orbiter
images to offer exposed bedrock for inspection.

"Each waypoint represents an opportunity for Curiosity to pause during
its long journey to Mount Sharp and study features of local interest,"
said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California
Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "These features are geologically
interesting, based on HiRISE images, and they lie very close to the path
that provides the most expeditious route to the base of Mount Sharp.
We'll study each for several sols, perhaps selecting one for drilling if
it looks sufficiently interesting."

After landing inside Gale Crater in August 2012, Curiosity drove
eastward to the Glenelg area, where it accomplished the mission's major
science objective of finding evidence for an ancient wet environment
that had conditions favorable for microbial life. The rover's route is
now southwestward. At Mount Sharp, in the middle of Gale Crater,
scientists anticipate finding evidence about how the ancient Martian
environment changed and evolved.

JPL, a division of Caltech, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project
for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and
built the project's Curiosity rover.

More information about Curiosity is online at
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://www.nasa.gov/msl and
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook
at http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at
http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster at jpl.nasa.gov

2013-259
Received on Tue 27 Aug 2013 06:43:45 PM PDT


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