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Building a robotic vehicle that will eventually travel to another planet is a complicated undertaking. With only one NASA rover, Curiosity, wandering on Mars after Opportunity's death, the much-publicized mission of March 2020 becomes even more important.
Doing well is testing, tweaking over and over again, and NASA has just released a new behind-the-scenes look at the intense testing process that the rover's onboard computers must support. Housed in a clean room of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's spacecraft assembly facility, mission 2020 equipment was to land on a simulated Martian surface that exists only in the complex computer brain of the spacecraft.
The Mars 2020 mission will target the Jezero crater on Mars as a landing site. It's a new area of Mars that has not been explored by a rover, and NASA's flight software needs to be tweaked to meet the unique challenges of landing in a new location. In his first real test, called Systems Test 1 (ST1), the rover's instincts proved they were up to the task.
"We landed for the first time on Jezero Crater on January 23," said Heather Bottom of JPL in a statement. "And the rover landed again on Mars two days later."
Successful tests certainly deserve to be celebrated when you talk about such complex hardware as a mobile robot. The different systems of the vehicle are usually designed and built separately, and it is only after marriage that engineers can begin to see if serious problems arise. In this case, it was a question of seeing how the electronic components and the software systems corresponded to the flight equipment.
"Nothing was moving visibly, but under the outer structure, on-board computers were exchanging, radios sending and receiving transmissions, fuel valves in and out, subsystems being powered on and off, and signals electrical devices being sent to non-existent pyrotechnic devices, "Bottom explains. "There was a lot going on in there."
The Mars 2020 mission will only really arrive on the red planet in February 2021. However, when it finally lands, it will be the most powerful piece of exploratory material that has ever landed on the planet. NASA hopes to reveal a lot of secrets.
Image Source: NASA / JPL
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