NASA lets Curiosity fire its own laser on Mars

Thanks to a new software update, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has become the first off-world exploration vehicle capable of autonomously selecting targets for one of its instruments, officials at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and their colleagues announced on Thursday.

The update allows Curiosity to select rock targets for chemical analysis using its ChemCam laser spectrometer without any input from a controller back on Earth, LANL scientists explained. In most cases, those targets will still be chosen by ground-based scientist, they noted, but the rover itself will be permitted to select several targets on its own each week.

Known as AEGIS (Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science), the software was developed by a engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, and requires scientists to set adjustable criteria, such as identifying rocks based on their size or brightness, for the rover to search for and target when working on its own.

As Roger Wiens, principal investigator for the ChemCam instrument at Los Alamos, said in a statement, it “will give us a chance to analyze even more rock and soil samples on Mars. The science team is not always available to pick samples for analysis,” he added. “Having a smarter rover that can pick its own samples is completely in line with self-driving cars and other smart technologies being implemented on Earth.”

Program will also make it easier to analyze fine-scale targets

The criteria used by AEGIS to help Curiosity select ChemCam targets can be altered based on the rover’s surroundings and the scientific goals of the measurements, the researchers said. The instrument uses spectrometers to record wavelengths while firing the laser, allowing scientists at Los Alamos to identify a rock’s chemical make-up.

The software was previously used on the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity to analyze images captured using a wide-angle camera as the basis for autonomously selecting rocks which are then photographed using a narrower-angle camera. AEGIS, which was honored by NASA as the best software developed in 2011, will analyze images from Curiosity’s Navigation Camera (Navcam) to select a target. It will then point ChemCam in the direction of that newfound target.

Alternatively, the program can use images from ChemCam’s own Remote Micro-Imager to find potential targets, analyzing those pictures to point the laser at fine-scale targets which were selected by scientists in advance, the laboratory explained. Located at the top of the rover’s mast, ChemCam can analyze the composition of a rock or soil target from approximately 23 feet (7 meters) away.

“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,” explained robotics engineer Tara Estlin, who led the development of the software at JPL. “AEGIS enables these targets to be hit on the first try by automatically identifying them and calculating a pointing that will center a ChemCam measurement on the target.”

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Image credit: NASA

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