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Mars team teaches old rovers new tricks
SpaceFlight Now ^ | December 29, 2006 | NASA/JPL NEWS RELEASE

Posted on 12/30/2006 2:12:11 PM PST by Unmarked Package

NASA's twin Mars rovers, nearing the third anniversary of their landings, are getting smarter as they get older.

The unexpected longevity of Spirit and Opportunity is giving the space agency a chance to field-test on Mars some new capabilities useful both to these missions and future rovers. Spirit will begin its fourth year on Mars on Jan. 3 (PST); Opportunity on Jan. 24. In addition to their continuing scientific observations, they are now testing four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers.

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."

Spirit has photographed dozens of dusty whirlwinds in action, and both rovers have photographed 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.

To recognize dust devils, the new software looks for changes from one image to the next, taken a few seconds apart, of the same field of view. To find clouds, it looks for non-uniform features in the portion of an image it recognizes as the sky.

Another new feature, called "visual target tracking," enables a rover to keep recognizing a designated landscape feature as the rover moves. Khaled Ali of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., flight software team leader for Spirit and Opportunity, said, "The rover keeps updating its template of what the feature looks like. 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. This new capability was developed by Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and JPL.

"Before this, the rovers could only think one step ahead about getting around an obstacle," said JPL's Dr. John Callas, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers. "If they encountered an obstacle or hazard, they'd back off one step and try a different direction, and if that direction didn't work they'd try another, then another. And sometimes the rover could not find a solution. With this new capability, the rover will be smarter about navigating in complex terrain, thinking several steps ahead. It could back out of a dead-end cul-de-sac. It could even find its way through a maze."

This is the most comprehensive of four revisions to the rovers' flight software since launch. One new version was uplinked during the cruise to Mars, and the rovers have switched to upgraded versions twice since their January 2004 landings.

Callas said, "These rovers are a great resource for testing software that could be useful to future Mars missions without sacrificing our own continuing mission of exploration. This new software will be a baseline for development of flight software for Mars Science Laboratory, but it's also helpful in operating Spirit and Opportunity." NASA's Mars Science Laboratory is a next-generation Mars rover in development for planned launch in 2009.

Spirit and Opportunity have worked on Mars for nearly 12 times as long as their originally planned prime missions of 90 Martian days. Spirit has driven about 6.9 kilometers (4.3 miles); Opportunity has driven about 9.8 kilometers (6.1 miles). Spirit has returned more than 88,500 images, Opportunity more than 80,700. All the raw images are available online.

Currently, Spirit is investigating rocks and soils near a ridge where it kept its solar panels tilted toward the sun during the Martian winter. Opportunity is exploring "Victoria Crater," where cliffs in the crater wall expose rock layers with clues about a larger span of Mars history than the rover has previously examined.

Opportunity's key discovery since landing has been mineral and rock-texture evidence that water drenched and flowed over the surface in at least one region of Mars long ago. Spirit has found evidence that water in some form has altered mineral composition of some soils and rocks in older hills above the plain where the rover landed.

Among the rovers' many other accomplishments:

NASA's Mars Technology Program and New Millennium Program sponsored development of the new capabilities included in the new flight software.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate.


TOPICS: Extended News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: mars; opportunity; rovers; spirit
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To: 1rudeboy

You INVESTED with them???? That's got to be the most expensive toilet paper in the world!


21 posted on 12/30/2006 3:26:24 PM PST by IronJack (=)
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To: blam
"...the intrepid little rovers are not only surviving into old age they are getting smarter!"

Little green men tuning them up.

22 posted on 12/30/2006 3:26:34 PM PST by org.whodat (Never let the facts get in the way of a good assumption.)
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To: IronJack
mid-1990's . . . invested about $1000.

I was gambling in Havana,
I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money,
Dad, get me out of this.
--Warren Zevon

23 posted on 12/30/2006 3:32:02 PM PST by 1rudeboy
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To: Tijeras_Slim

I'd have to put the Viking landers in there with the rovers. The pictures they sent back from Mars were astonishing by themselves.


24 posted on 12/30/2006 3:47:25 PM PST by gcruse (http://garycruse.blogspot.com/)
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To: 1rudeboy
See how well they did with cheap, Chinese, prison engineers? If we still had good old 'merican engineers, they'd have terraformed Mars by now. LOL!
25 posted on 12/30/2006 3:58:50 PM PST by Toddsterpatriot (If you agree with EPI, you're not a conservative!)
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To: Toddsterpatriot

Gawd, take your political views to another thread.


26 posted on 12/30/2006 4:02:09 PM PST by dirtboy (Objects in tagline are closer than they appear)
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To: dirtboy

Humor over your head?


27 posted on 12/30/2006 4:05:26 PM PST by Toddsterpatriot (If you agree with EPI, you're not a conservative!)
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To: Toddsterpatriot

No, try being humorous first.


28 posted on 12/30/2006 4:05:58 PM PST by dirtboy (Objects in tagline are closer than they appear)
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To: dirtboy

Holiday depression can be tough. Don't do anything rash.


29 posted on 12/30/2006 4:08:48 PM PST by Toddsterpatriot (If you agree with EPI, you're not a conservative!)
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To: Toddsterpatriot
Wal Mart is having a sale on clues.

Go get one.

30 posted on 12/30/2006 4:14:49 PM PST by dirtboy (Objects in tagline are closer than they appear)
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To: dirtboy

Are those Chinese slave labor clues?


31 posted on 12/30/2006 4:19:18 PM PST by Toddsterpatriot (If you agree with EPI, you're not a conservative!)
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To: Unmarked Package

Prior to a manned mission to the Moon and Mars, there are several intermediate steps that will save vast amounts of time, effort and energy.

1) We are currently planning heavy-lift unmanned rockets, capable of carrying 100 tons of cargo into orbit. We should use these to take modular spaceship units up for assembly in orbit. They can also carry fuel and provisions.

2) The first thing we build in orbit is a big engine with fuel tanks. Its purpose is to shuttle other spaceships back and forth between Earth and their destination orbit. This saves a LOT of problems, and lets the carried ships take a lot more cargo with them, instead of fuel. We did this before, in the original Lunar landing program, but it should be scaled up considerably. The shuttle would never land.

3) Second, our first mission to the Moon or Mars should be tunneling-mining robots that can dig hard-rock horizontal shafts. Such tunnels solve many problems and are far easier to make habitable, and just generally better, than shipping pre-fab habitations from Earth. These robots could work slowly and methodically for years before manned arrival, powered by a lightly shielded small nuclear reactor brought with them. And they continue to work once people are there, continuing to improve the tunnel system.

4) Though it is still on the drawing board, if they can ever build a functioning Space Elevator, the size of missions to the Moon and Mars can be increased by a factor of 10 or more. Instead of a 200 ton spaceship, we could build in orbit a 2,000 ton ship, the size of a destroyer.


32 posted on 12/30/2006 5:02:33 PM PST by Popocatapetl
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To: gcruse; Tijeras_Slim; All
"I'd have to put the Viking landers in there with the rovers. The pictures they sent back from Mars were astonishing by themselves."

I'm right there with you on the striking success of the Viking 1 & 2 Mars landers.

Not only did they produce detailed closeup photographs from the surface of Mars as you mentioned (4500 images total from both landers, the very first color picture from Viking 1 is shown below), they were spectacular achievements in the number of new technologies attempted for the first time in a space probe that worked successfully.

Besides the closeup surface photography, the Viking probes were the first spacecraft from Earth to land intact on Mars, the first to collect weather related measurements on Mars (more than 3 million measurements total) including observations of dust storms for the first time, and the first probes to make in situ biological tests for life on another planet.

It's an astounding story that all those firsts were accomplished successfully by the Viking project as long ago as 1976.

Viking 1 operated continuously for more than 6 years on the surface of Mars and Viking 2 operated for nearly four years.

Both landers were powered by nuclear thermoelectric generators using heat released by the natural decay of plutonium to produce electricity. That was in a time before the environmentalist wacko movement when spacecraft design decisions were made based on real science instead of junk science and emotion.


33 posted on 12/30/2006 5:02:35 PM PST by Unmarked Package (Amazing surprises await us under cover of a humble exterior.)
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To: Cacique

btt for later


34 posted on 12/30/2006 5:12:58 PM PST by Cacique (quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat ( Islamia Delenda Est ))
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To: geopyg

I think that is a Pennsylvania Dutch saying. My Lancaster County grandparents had that one also.


35 posted on 12/30/2006 6:29:37 PM PST by DigitalVideoDude (It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit. -Ronald Reagan)
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To: Popocatapetl

Is a Space Elevator feasible? How about just a long cable and pull stuff up? As you are pulling you would have to hold your elevation that would take just as much fuel wouldn’t it?


36 posted on 12/30/2006 6:39:24 PM PST by Steve Van Doorn (*in my best Eric cartman voice* ?I love you guys?)
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To: Toddsterpatriot

ROFL


37 posted on 12/30/2006 7:17:23 PM PST by Professional Engineer (As far as we know, all numbers are imaginary. some just hurt your brain more than others. ~ lepton)
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To: Molly Pitcher

The little guys are still plugging away...:-)


38 posted on 12/30/2006 7:32:49 PM PST by Dog
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To: Steve Van Doorn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

However, that's only part of the story. Right now, they are trying to make longer and longer sections of carbon ribbon, and with each length breakthrough, like 1mm, 1in, 1 foot, 1 meter, etc., will come all sorts of unrelated, but high value applications.

Each of these can be spun off for thousands of other technologies, and the royalties will start to add up and fully fund more innovation--and maybe eventually a space elevator.

The material exists, the math supports it. Now what they need is a process to create it at the lengths they need.


39 posted on 12/30/2006 7:41:53 PM PST by Popocatapetl
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To: Strategerist

Thanks for the reading suggestion. I have the book, but it's in the "que" and haven't yet gotten to it. The IMAX film is pretty good too.


40 posted on 12/30/2006 10:10:58 PM PST by My2Cents ("Friends stab you from the front." -- Oscar Wilde)
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