NASA’s Mars rover named Perseverance is all set to traverse quickly into the Martian delta using artificial intelligence (AI).
The rover will cover a significant distance in a single month, which has never been achieved before to date.
According to mission officials, the six-wheeled rover is now on a 5-kilometer filled with sandpits, craters, and fields of sharp rocks. The mission began on March 14th, 2022, and will take the Perseverance rover to an ancient river delta on Mars.
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The intriguing fact about the 40-meter high ancient river delta within Jezero Crater is that it had a lake that existed billions of years ago and has indications of prior microscopic life.
Perseverance will use its self-driving AutoNav technology, which can “think while driving,” allowing it to take and process photographs while driving.
Perseverance’s venture scientist, Ken Farley of Caltech, said, “The delta is so necessary that we’ve truly determined to minimize science actions and give attention to driving to get there extra rapidly.”
He further added that they would be capturing a lot of images of the delta throughout the trip. The closer they get, the more amazing those images may become. Scientists will then study the captured images in detail using the high-tech instruments present in the Mars rover.
Scientists have integrated Perseverance with an extra computer dedicated solely to image processing. The component uses a field-programmable gate array, which is a single-purpose, super-efficient microprocessor that is ideal for computer vision processing.
“When we first looked at Jezero Crater as a landing site, we were concerned about the dense fields of rocks we saw scattered across the crater floor,” said veteran rover planner and flight software developer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mark Maimone.
