Perseverance Rover Is Using Auto-Navigation On Mars

NASA’s Perseverance rover is busy exploring the surface of the Red Planet. Currently, the rover is using its enhanced AutoNav technology, leveraging something NASA calls “thinking while driving” as it cruises the surface of Mars. Perseverance isn’t choosing its own path or completely driving itself. It is being handled in part by controllers on the ground.

However, due to the lag in signals between Earth and Mars, Perseverance must be responsible for some of its driving tasks. Perseverance can reach a top speed of 393 feet per hour compared to Curiosity using an earlier version of AutoNav, which could only reach 66 feet per hour.

We sped up AutoNav by four or five times, said Michael McHenry, the mobility domain lead and part of JPLs team of rover planners. Were driving a lot farther in a lot less time than Curiosity demonstrated.

Perseverance is currently conducting its first science operations on the floor of Jezero Crater, and the AutoNav feature is key to getting the work done. Perseverance is gathering samples over nine miles and prepping the samples for collection by future missions that will bring them back to Earth for analysis.