Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 2, 2017

Fed2 Star last page Fed2 Star: Official News page 5 Fed2 Star next page

REAL LIFE NEWS: CURIOSITY’S AUTONOMY A GREAT SUCCESS

by Hazed

The problem with sending rovers to Mars is that there are long periods when it’s impossible to communicate with them. It’s impossible to give them new instructions during these periods so time that could be spent doing science experiments is wasted.

To get around the idleness caused by the comms blackout, in late 2015 NASA uploaded a software upgrade to Curiosity, which allowed it to operate autonomously. The aim of the Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) code was to let the rover think for itself, to make decisions about what to do when it’s out of touch with Earth.

It turns out that this was a really good idea, and it’s been a great success. A recently published paper describes how AEGIS lets Curiosity pick its own targets – rocks which it vaporizes with a laser so it can examine the resulting gases with its ChemCam.

AEGIS makes its decisions based on images captured by the rover’s NavCam, and by the ChemCam’s own Remote Micro-Imager context camera. Once it detects a suitable target, it instructs the ChemCam to get blasting.

The paper says that AEGIS is making good assessments of what to zap: “in a number of cases [AEGIS] has chosen rock targets which were among the same ones that were independently ranked highly by the science team for study.”

This is excellent news for future missions, because AEGIS is going to be used in the Mars 2020 rover.

Meanwhile, see the second link below for a picture of Curiosity climbing up the rocky slopes of Mount Sharp, taken by the camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/22/curiosity_rover_aegis_ai_software_doing_brilliantly/
http://gizmodo.com/this-is-one-of-the-coolest-shots-of-the-mars-curiosity-1796293399

Fed2 Star last page Fed2 Star next page