Future NASA Mars Rovers May Have Smart Camera to Tackle Terrain

The Mars rover Curiosity continues to trek across the Red Planet. While it's made some crucial and surprising discoveries, though, it's remained largely dependent on instructions from scientists. Now, researchers have begun the development of a new camera that may allow future rovers to decide whether to keep exploring a particular site or move on.

The Mars rover is relatively limited when it comes to its movements on Mars. At the beginning of each Martian day, scientists upload an agenda to the Mars rover. This schedule details nearly all of the rover's movements: how far it travels, what pictures it takes and what experiments it should conduct and when. This system is necessary since even moving at light speed, instructions from Earth can take as much as 20 minutes to reach the surface of Mars. The 40-minute round trip therefore makes real-time control of the rover impossible.

"If the rover could prioritize what's scientifically important, it would suddenly have the capability to take more images than it knows it can send back," said Kiri Wagstaff, a computer scientist and geologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a news release. "That goes hand in hand with its ability to discover new things that weren't anticipated."

That's not to say that Curiosity is completely helpless. Scientists have recently introduced autonomous navigation for the rover. This allows Curiosity to decide exactly what path to take over rough terrain without input from scientists. Yet the ability to be able to determine whether or not sites are worth further study would add to the rover's capabilities.

The new camera is called TextureCam. It has the ability to snap 3D images and also possesses a special processor separate from the rover's main computer that can analyze the pictures. By recognizing textures in the photos, the processor distinguishes between sand, rocks and sky. The processor then uses the size and distance to rocks in the picture to determine if any are scientifically important layered rocks.

"You do have to provide it with some initial training, just like you would with a human, where you give it example images of what to look for," said Wagstaff. "But once it knows what to look for, it can make the same decisions we currently do on Earth."

The new camera could be crucial for future missions to Mars. It could help streamline instructions and could allow rovers cope with changing environments and conditions. This, in turn, could lead to future scientific discoveries.

The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.