Curiosity's autofocus fixed, better than ever

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

NASA has successfully repaired the busted autofocus capabilities on the Curiosity’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument, improving the Mars rovers’ ability to collect data about the chemical composition of targets, the US space agency announced on Friday.

ChemCam, which gathers information by zapping rocks and other features of interest with laser pulses and taking spectrometer readings of the resulting sparks, used a tiny laser to do this during its first two years on the planet. That laser was lost several months ago, however.

“Without this laser rangefinder, the ChemCam instrument was somewhat blind,” Roger Wiens, ChemCam principal investigator at Los Alamos National Laboratory, explained. “The main laser that creates flashes of plasma when it analyzes rocks and soils up to 25 feet from the rover was not affected, but the laser analyses only work when the telescope projecting the laser light to the target is in focus.”

Software patch could prove better-than-ever images

According to Engadget, since the loss of the laser, the Curiosity team has instructed the rover to take nine images of a subject using ChemCam, each at a different focus, to get one that would be considered usable. That image would be sent home, and the same procedure would be used for each analysis attempted using the instrument.

The failure of the focusing laser was discovered in November, and the team started working on a software fix in December. They tested the patch on a ChemCam clone working at a laboratory at Los Alamos, and later at a facility in France and on a rover testbed at NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, before receiving the green light from the agency last week.

The fix entailed transmitting a 40-kilobyte software fix over the airwaves to the rover, and while it continues to snap multiple images, it now uses those to automatically select the perfect focus for the final images and laser analyses that will be sent back to Earth. The patch was applied last week and both Curiosity and its ChemCam instrument have already gone back to work.

Prior to the patch, the instrument was returning eight blurry images and one in focus, “a rather poor return for the effort and time, but better than nothing,” Wiens said in a statement. Now, with the fix, “we think we will actually have better quality images and analyses with this new software than the original,” he added.

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