Israeli Scientists Pioneer Efforts To Make Future Mars Rovers
Self-Navigating
There was a time when we wondered
how much fun it would be to remote-pilot one of the Mars rovers
across the surface of the Red Planet.
That lasted about five minutes.
Consider: The pilots of Spirit and Opportunity must very
carefully figure out where they want to go, assess the risks and
painstakingly plot a course. Then they have to hope that nothing
will come in the rover's way and that there are no unexpected
terrain features because it takes several minutes for the driver's
instructions to reach the vehicle itself, given the distance and
those bothersome equations from Einstein regarding the speed of
light. And then there's the fact that you just can't get driver's
insurance on Mars...
But a team of Israeli scientists working with NASA hopes to
change all that. The idea is to develop software that would allow
the rovers, for the most part, to get where they're going on their
own.
"You'll be able to leave the rover alone for two days and not
come back to find that it fell into a crater," said Professor Zvi
Shiller, from the College of Judea and Samaria (CJS), who is
heading the three-year project.
But, Schiller warns, a self-guided rover "is based on the rather
strong assumption we get a good digital map of the area of the
robot," and scientists do not yet have all the data necessary to
build such maps.
That could be changing, however, with satellites now in orbit
around Mars, taking detailed photos to map the surface. Nothing in
Shiller's world is more important.
"You need to know the topography, the geography of the surface,
the consistency of the ground," he said. "Is it sand? Is it rock?
Using this information we can calculate 'good paths' that are fast,
short and take into account descent, tip over, slide."
Shiller's goal, however, seems hampered by politics endemic to
the Middle East. Left-wing Jewish activists have bombarded the US
government and NASA, demanding that the project not be funded with
American dollars.
It's not.
The Israeli Ministry of Science, through the Israel Space
Agency, is "the only government agency actually supporting us," he
said. Funding for the project's recently completed first year was a
modest $32,600.
Still, the Israeli-American scientist says his group at the
university will plod on in its research. "We definitely suffer from
a very limited budget," he said, "but I think we will eventually
come up with a good product. It just means lots and lots of
hours."