Curiosity Rover Gets New Software & Heads for Second Drill Site
Rick Welch, MSL Tactical Operations Mission Manager, gives an update on the happenings of NASA's Curiosity Rover. Curiosity has gotten new software called AutoNav that allows the rover to navigate on its own. The AutoNav capability will help Curiosity select safe routes and make better progress. A second drilling target, called Cumberland, lies about nine feet west of John Klein - the rock where Curiosity's drill first touched Martian stone in February.
Transcript
00:00:05 hi I'm Rick Welch tactical operations Mission manager and this is your Curiosity Rover report as many of you know curiosity was in a period called solar conjunction during this time Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the sun it can be hard to communicate between the Rover and Earth during this time and so we did a minimum set of Science and we all took a
00:00:23 well-deserved spring break our first activity after solar conjunction was to update curiosity software we developed that software here on Earth and tested it out in our test bed to make sure it worked right we then sent it up to the Rover this new software has capabilities to allow curiosity to navigate on her own something we call autonomous navigation or autonav up until now
00:00:44 curiosity's just used basic driving or what we call blind driving where the Rover planners here on Earth do most of the planning for her the autonav capability will really help curiosity select safe routes and make better progress each day another update was for additional onboard safety checks for the chemcam instrument chem Cam's telescopic eye can be sensitive to the sun it's
00:01:05 therefore important that we never Point directly at the Sun for a long period of time with the chem cam we've updated the Ard software to calculate where the sun is and make sure that the chem cam doesn't get pointed in the wrong direction the plans for upcoming activities include getting calibration images from the navigation cameras at the top of curiosity's mask we switched
00:01:25 to the bside computer before solar conjunction and this meant we also switched to using a different set of navigation cameras the calibration images will help ensure that the cameras are working properly before we drive to a new location and we may be drilling again soon scientists and Engineers have been hard at work looking for new targets and
00:01:42 where we could drill one such Target is just a few meters west from the Rover and could be a potential second drill site we're planning a short drive or bump into this position hopefully by the end of this week so we'll be ready for our second drilling campaign this has been your Curiosity Rover report please check back for more updates