Mars Microrover Navigation: Performance Evaluation and Enhancement
In 1996, NASA will launch the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, which will carry an 11 kg rover to.
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In 1996, NASA will launch the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, which will carry an 11 kg rover to.
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This paper describes MFEX and the four factors that contribute to the feasibility of small rovers.
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Much prior work in mobile robot path planning has been based on assumptions that are not really applicable for exploration of planetary terrains.
This paper summarizes the activites and results of the effort to conduct a low-cost, yet meaningful risk management program for the MFEX, which was originally designated as a high risk payload.
Non-geometric hazards (i.e., those which cannot be characterized solely by their shape, but instead are related to mechanical properties such as strength and friction) may pose a significant risk to planetary rovers. This paper describes a means for an articulated vehicle to detect sinkage and slippage in such material so as to prevent entrapment and to correct for dead-reckoning errors.
The advent of spacecraft miniaturization promises a new generation of affordable planetary missions; they will be more cost effective - by one to two orders of magniture - than those of traditional design.
A discussion of the power requirements for the Mars Pathfinder Mission is given. Topics include: battery requirements; cell design; battery design; test descriptions and results. A summary of the results is also included.
On-board the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, launched in December of 1996, is a small roving vehicle named Sojourner. On Sojourner is an experiment to determine the abrasive characteristics of the Martian surface, called the Wheel Abrasion Experiment (WAE). The experiment works as follows: one of the wheels of the rover has a strip of black anodized aluminum bonded to the tread. The aluminum strip has thin coatings of aluminum, nickel and platinum deposited in patches. There are five (5) patches or samples of each metal, and the patches range in thickness from 200 A to 1000 A. The different metals were chosen for their differing hardness and their environmental stability. As the wheel is spun in the Martian soil, the thin patches of metal are abraded away, exposing the black anodization. The abrasion is monitored by measuring the amount of light reflected off of the samples. A photodetector was developed for this purpose, and that is the subject of this paper.
The NASA Lewis Research Center has a prime role in the Mars Pathfinder mission, the first in the series of Discovery-class missions, sponsored by NASA Headquarter's Office of Space Science. Mars Pathfinder is an engineering proof-of-concept mission intended to demonstrate the successful deployment of scientific instruments, including a small rover, on a planetary body and to gain engineering design information for follow-on systems. The mission was launched in December 1996 and will land on Mars on July 4, 1997.
The Mars exploration program has as an overarching theme the search for and understanding of life, climate and resources on Mars. The ability to move about the surface of Mars is key to making measurements and the gathering of the data which address this theme.
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