The Curiosity Rover has been roaming the surface of Mars for more than 1,400 days under the watchful eye of the Nasa team. Now a software update has made it more autonomous and less reliant on these vigilant scientists.
For the first time the rover is able to self-select the rocks it is going to study, before it fires its laser spectrometer at its target.
A software update, designed and coded by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, added the capacity to the spacecraft meaning it can work more independently of the scientists on Earth – 46 million miles away.
The system works by analysing images from the rover's selfie-taking camera. Nasa staff programmed the update to use image recognition to identify rocks based on their size or brightness – the settings can be changed depending on what the machine is studying, or its location.
Using the system, called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS), it's then able to point its laser at the target selected and fire.
"AEGIS enables these targets to be hit on the first try by automatically identifying them and calculating a pointing that will centre a ChemCam measurement on the target," Tara Estlin from Nasa said.
She continued that the autonomy is "particularly useful" when scientists are unavailable to be at the rover's controls.
The laser spectrometer is able to analyse the composition of a rock or Martian soil from around seven metres away, the space agency said. "Due to their small size and other pointing challenges, hitting these targets accurately with the laser has often required the rover to stay in place while ground operators fine tune pointing parameters," Estlin explained.
During the rover's four years on Mars it has used its rock inspecting laser to examine more than 1,400 objects and fired more than 350,000 laser shorts at 10,000 points in total.
This week Nasa also unveiled its final plans for its next Mars rover, which will launch in 2020.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
