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Rover

Mars Exploration Rover

NASA robotic exploration program aimed at elucidating the history of water on the Martian surface through mobility and instrument deployment.

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Overview

Overview

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) is a NASA robotic exploration program with the primary goal of elucidating the history of water on the surface of Mars. The mission requires deploying scientific instruments at multiple surface locations to perform in situ analysis, which relies on the mobility and Instrument Deployment Device (IDD, or robotic arm) subsystems.

Operations and Data Analysis

Driving and manipulation activities on the Mars Exploration Rovers often must be planned from scratch each day, making this a fast-paced activity by typical space mission standards. Such a schedule requires rapid turnaround in understanding what happened during activities on the previous Martian Solar Day (Sol). To support this, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) developed an advanced set of tools to help speed up the understanding of previous Sols’ activities. These tools automatically generate plots of detailed engineering data and incorporate them into HTML pages, allowing quick visual inspection of each activity.

Data from different sources are grouped together and written into “Annotated CSV” files, enabling detailed analysis even in the presence of only partial data, and enabling multi-Sol queries spanning the whole mission lifetime. The system automatically processes newly received data to inform the team of the current vehicle state via email and multimedia cell phone updates.

Technical Context

MER rover telemetry includes Event Reports (EVRs), Engineering, Housekeeping, and Accountability “Channelized Telemetry” (EH&A), and timestamped binary Data Products. The MER flight software underwent four updates between launch in June 2003 and December 2007. The downlink analysis tools developed by the JPL team enabled rapid understanding of complex mobility and manipulation activities during the first four years of Mars Exploration Rover operations.

Sources and references

  1. Report on Robotics Technology for NASA's Planetary Science ... NASA
  2. Service Oriented Robotic Architecture for Space Robotics NASA
  3. Anthropomorphic Robot Design and User Interaction ... NASA
  4. Mars Exploration Rover Mobility and IDD Downlink Analysis ... NASA
  5. Exploration technologies for operations - C3 - NASA NASA
  6. MarsFAST - ESA Science & Technology European Space Agency
  7. A Study of Past, Present, and Future Mars Rotorcraft NASA