NASA’s Perseverance rover achieved a new milestone on Mars by autonomously navigating through a particularly hazardous area.
The rugged terrain that the Perseverance rover had to traverse at Snowdrift Peak. Image: NASA.
The rover’s AutoNav system allowed it to traverse a region with more rocks than any environment it had encountered before. This impressive journey saved precious weeks for scientists to conduct further research. While mission controllers typically manually plan the robot’s route, AutoNav demonstrated its ability to safely guide Perseverance around obscured boulders in images taken from orbit.
“This area had more rock boulders than any environment Perseverance has encountered before,” said Del Sesto, deputy chief rover planner at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “We didn’t want to go the long way around because it would have taken many weeks. Running the robot longer means less science time, so we chose to go straight,” Sesto explained.
In late June 2023, Perseverance entered a rocky field named “Snowdrift Peak” from the east. First, the robot stopped to examine two boulders, and then, with the help of AutoNav, it rolled through the field. When the robot exited Snowdrift Peak at the end of July, it had covered 759 meters. The distance was slightly longer than the 520 meters that would have been covered following a straight path.
NASA’s exploration rovers have been safeguarded in unfamiliar terrain by automated navigation systems since 1997 when the first Mars rover, Sojourner, avoided hazardous rocks using silicon-based position-determination devices. But with a memory that is only 13 cm long, the robot had to stop to adjust its direction based on the surrounding environment. Now, Perseverance no longer needs to halt to determine its next course, thanks to cameras and image-processing computers that assist AutoNav in real-time route planning.