In Operation
Direct teleoperation of a Mars rover is impractical, since the round trip communication time between Earth and Mars ranges from 8 to 42 minutes and the Deep Space Network system is only available a few times during each Martian day (sol). Therefore a rover command team plans, then sends, a sol of operational commands to the rover at one time.
A rover uses autonomy software to make decisions based on observations from its sensors. Each pair of images for stereo the Sojourner rover could generate 20 navigation 3D points (with the initial software version the craft landed with). The MER rovers can generate 15,000 (nominal) to 40,000 (survey mode) 3D points.
Read more about this topic: Comparison Of Embedded Computer Systems On Board The Mars Rovers
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)