PASADENA, Calif. – Using an anonymous patch of the American West as a stand-in for Mars, NASA has begun the second field tests of an advanced rover prototype developed to help it explore the Red Planet.
The FIDO rover during earlier tests in the California desert. The rover may play a key role in the return of samples from Mars.
The trails began Sunday with the FIDO – that’s Field Integrated Design & Operations – rover making a simulated landing on a patch of rocky desert at an undisclosed location.
For the next two weeks, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. will remotely control the rover as if it were on faraway Mars, simulating in every sense an actual mission. A small crew on site – a location unknown to most of the science team – will tend to the rover at night, but otherwise not interfere with the test.
"We are completely cut off from all information we can get about the site, other than what we see in pictures," said Steve Squyres, chairman of the core operations team and a professor of astronomy at Cornell University. "The idea is to make this as flight-like as possible."
The FIDO rover with its instrument arm extended.
The rover has already begun the prospecting portion of the mission, using its panoramic camera to take a 180-degree view of its surroundings. The main science team, sequestered at JPL, began using that view on Monday to piece together a plan of attack for the next few days, identifying targets it will direct the rover to visit. The images show that the site abounds with colorful rocks and soils, Squyres said.
The goal of the operations-readiness test is to formulate hypotheses about the geological history of the site, and then use the rover’s instruments to test those same theories.
"Think of it as a robotic field geologist," Squyres said of the rover. "It’s our eyes, hands and feet out there in the desert."
NASA undertook similar tests last year at a desert site near Baker, California, although that trial was not blind.
Scientists watching FIDO during earlier field tests.
FIDO was originally a prototype of a large rover called Athena, which NASA had hoped to make a centerpiece of its efforts to collect and return samples of rock and soil to Earth from Mars. Since the recent losses of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander, however, the American space agency has reined in its immediate plans to explore the Red Planet, leaving the future of sample return – and Athena – in doubt.
Originally, Athena was to carry a suite of six instruments. For now, FIDO carries just three: its color stereo imager, an infrared spectrometer and a microscopic imager mounted at the end of its robotic arm.
"In this field test we are not simulating sample collection," Squyres stressed. "We are just using it as a pure exploration vehicle."
Over the next two weeks, a group of high-school students will join the field test, taking turns driving the rover from JPL.
The FIDO rover is much more independent and can range farther afield than Sojourner, the six-wheeled robot that was the star of 1997’s Mars Pathfinder mission. A second, near-identical prototype, called Canine, will join FIDO during the trials.
advertisement
