How fast can curiosity move

That means the rovers have to be able to move quickly and effectively. Moving safely from rock to rock or location to location is a major challenge because of the communication time delay between Earth and Mars, which is about 20 minutes on average.

Unlike a remote controlled car, the drivers of rovers on Mars cannot instantly see what is happening to a rover at any given moment and they cannot send quick commands to prevent the rover from running into a rock or falling off of a cliff. During surface operations on Mars, each rover receives a new set of instructions at the beginning of each sol. Sent from the scientists and engineers on Earth, the command sequence tells the rover what targets to go to and what science experiments to perform on Mars.

The rover is expected to move over a given distance, precisely position itself with respect to a target, and deploy its instruments to take close-up pictures and analyze the minerals or elements of rocks and soil. The rover has a difficult time knowing exactly how far it has traveled, where it has been and where it is. For example, if the flight team asks the rover to move forward centimeters, turn right, then extend its robotic arm and analyze a rock, the rover will follow the commands in reference to its current location.

What would happen if the rover couldn't see, and had to rely just on its wheels to tell where it had moved? Like a car on Earth, the rover uses its odometer to click off the distance it has traveled.

But, unlike cars on Earth, the rover doesn't drive on smooth, paved roads. The rover moves on rocky and sandy martian terrain. The rover wheels might have a hard time grasping onto the loose-gravel ground. The wheels could spin in place before they actually gain tracking. So if the wheels spin four times before they find firm footing, the odometer will read centimeters, and the rover will stop. Thus, the rover will believe it has moved forward centimeters, when in reality, it hasn't moved at all and may have dug itself into a rut instead.

Without other safety checks it might then turn and bang its wide solar panel wing into a rock behind it that wouldn't have been in the area if the rover had moved forward. The rover would then continue to follow the chain of commands and extend its robotic arm, hoping to meet the rock centimeters from where the rover began its "trek.

IEEE websites place cookies on your device to give you the best user experience. By using our websites, you agree to the placement of these cookies. To learn more, read our Privacy Policy. Which would be a pretty remarkable thing unto itself. But if you were waiting for the rover to go boldly exploring, your mind might soon wander.

The Curiosity rover , which landed on Mars in and has the same chassis, often goes just 50 or 60 meters in a day. Which is why Rich Rieber and his teammates have been at work for five years, building a new driving system for Perseverance that they hope will set some land-speed records for Mars. Rieber is the lead mobility systems engineer for the Perseverance mission. With luck, Perseverance will leave past rovers in the dust.

The rover, if everything works, will still have a maximum speed of only 4. It would travel the length of a football field in 45 minutes.

That helps tell the rover where it is. It then adds stereo imagery from two navigational cameras on its top mast and six hazard-detection cameras on its body.

Each camera has a megapixel color sensor. The so-called Navcams have a degree field of view. They can pick out a golf ball-sized object 25 meters away. These numbers add up: The technology should allow the rover to pick out obstacles as it goes—a ridge, an outcropping of rock, a risky-looking depression—and steer around many of them without help from Earth.

Mission managers plan to send the rover its marching orders each morning, Martian time, and then wait for it to report its progress the next time it can communicate with Earth. Earlier rovers often had to image where they were and stop for the day to await new instructions from Earth. Perseverance may more than triple that. There are, however, still myriad complexities to driving on Mars.

For instance, mission engineers can calculate how far Perseverance will go with each revolution of its six wheels. But what if the wheels on one side slip because they were driving through sand?

How far behind or off its planned path might it be? The closer [together] you have your transistors, the more susceptible they are. Matt Wallace, the deputy project manager, has been on previous missions when—sometimes only in hindsight—engineers realized they had barely escaped disaster. But the payoff would come if the rover came across chemical signatures of life on Mars from billions of years ago.

If Perseverance finds that, it could change our view of life on Earth. Is there a spot somewhere at Jezero crater that could offer such an incredible scientific breakthrough? The first step is to drive to it. To fight on tomorrow's more complicated battlefields, militaries must adapt commercial technologies. In August , engineers from Lockheed and the U. Army demonstrated a flying 5G network, with base stations installed on multicopters, at the U.

Driverless military vehicles followed a human-driven truck at up to 50 kilometers per hour. Powerful processors on the multicopters shared the processing and communications chores needed to keep the vehicles in line.

It's , and the sun beats down on a vast desert coastline. A fighter jet takes off accompanied by four unpiloted aerial vehicles UAVs on a mission of reconnaissance and air support. A dozen special forces soldiers have moved into a town in hostile territory, to identify targets for an air strike on a weapons cache. Commanders need live visual evidence to correctly identify the targets for the strike and to minimize damage to surrounding buildings.

The problem is that enemy jamming has blacked out the team's typical radio-frequency bands around the cache. Conventional, civilian bands are a no-go because they'd give away the team's position. As the fighter jet and its automated wingmen cross into hostile territory, they are already sweeping the ground below with radio-frequency, infrared, and optical sensors to identify potential threats. On a helmet-mounted visor display, the pilot views icons on a map showing the movements of antiaircraft batteries and RF jammers, as well as the special forces and the locations of allied and enemy troops.

While all this is going on, the fighter jet's autonomous wingmen establish an ad hoc, high-bandwidth mesh communication network that cuts through the jamming by using unjammed frequencies, aggregating signals across different radio channels, and rapidly switching among different channels.

Through a self-organizing network of communication nodes, the piloted fighter in the air connects to the special forces on the ground. As soon as the network is established, the soldiers begin transmitting real-time video of artillery rockets being transported into buildings. The fighter jet acts as a base station, connecting the flying mesh network of the UAVs with a network of military and commercial satellites accessible to commanders all over the world. Processors distributed among the piloted and unpiloted aircraft churn through the data, and artificial-intelligence AI algorithms locate the targets and identify the weapons in the live video feed being viewed by the commanders.

Suddenly, the pilot sees a dot flashing on the far horizon through his helmet-mounted display. Instantly, two of the four teammates divert toward the location indicated by the flash. The helmet lights up a flight path toward the spot, and the pilot receives new orders scrolling across the display:. The two UAVs that have flown ahead start coordinating to identify the location of hostile forces in the vicinity of the downed aircraft. A Navy rescue helicopter and medical support vessel are already en route.

Meanwhile, with the fighter jet speeding away on a new mission, the two other UAVs supporting the special forces squad shift their network configuration to directly link to the satellite networks now serving the base-station role formerly played by the fighter jet. The live video feed goes on uninterrupted. The reconfigurations happen swiftly and without human intervention. Warfare has always been carried out at the boundary between chaos and order.

Strategists have long tried to suppress the chaos and impose order by means of intelligence, communication, and command and control. The most powerful weapon is useless without knowing where to aim it.

Curiosity uses its high-gain antenna to receive commands for the mission team back on Earth. The high-gain antenna can send a "beam" of information in a specific direction, and it is steerable, so the antenna can move to point itself directly to any antenna on Earth. The benefit of having a steerable antenna is that the entire rover doesn't necessarily have to change positions to talk to Earth.

The fastest time it takes for a high-resolution, colour image to arrive at Nasa from the moment it is snapped by the rover is about 30 minutes - but it may take up to several hours, he adds.

In the future it could become possible to send more data at a time between planets - and maybe even stream HD video. Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT and JPL have been developing detectors able to sense laser signals in the infrared part of the optical spectrum - all the way down to the smallest unit of light, a photon.

Optical signals have a much shorter wavelength than radio frequency signals, which means much higher data rates. A single photon-counting detector translates the arrival of a single photon into an electrical pulse, which is then processed to retrieve data. The US space agency aims to test the detectors in , during the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration experiment.

The technology will try to transfer data from the Moon to the Earth at a rate of Mbps - much faster than average broadband speed, but still slower than the fastest Earth networks that send data at speeds of 20Gbps and above. For Mars, the detectors could increase the data transfer rate to Mbps by about , says Mr Townes.

And if the next-generation rovers are set up to stream video, maybe one day viewers on Earth will get a much better sensation of what it is like to move around on the Red Planet.

Rover to 'drive, drive, drive'.