The Roving

Before the Sample Retrieval Lander travels to Mars, Vandi Verma (SCS 2005), chief engineer of robotic operations for Mars 2020, has work to do on the surface operations side of the mission, driving the Perseverance rover — her fourth Mars rover — and the Ingenuity helicopter around the planet’s surface collecting samples with the goal of studying the geology and astrobiology of Mars, and preparing for the arrival of astronauts. The Jezero Crater River Delta was chosen because it has the highest likelihood of finding signs of life on the red planet.

“We've got an instrument that can synthesize oxygen from the atmosphere,” said Verma.

Access to plenty of oxygen is critical to the success of any mission to Mars with humans. “The main part of this mission is to core,” said Verma, which means to “have a robotic drill that cores under the surface, collect sample cores, intact and caches them for subsequent return to Earth.” Verma points out that it will be the first time samples from Mars will be brought back to Earth.

Communicating with a planet as far away as Mars remains a slow business. It takes 24 minutes for the team to send a message to the rover telling it where to go next. Three towers located around the globe make up the antenna that keeps the team in contact with Perseverance, but it takes time to analyze what the rover is seeing and communicate its next move.

As a result, some level of autonomy assisted Perseverance’s forward progress. Because the LVS lander chose a slightly different location for the safety of the landing, Perseverance had to cover extra ground to make its way back to the river delta region of the Jezero Crater. To accomplish this, the team utilized information gathered from the Ingenuity copter as well as Perseverance’s own autonomous navigation to arrive as quickly as possible. The team tells Perseverance the targeted locations goal and it uses autonomy to avoid hazards. Using computer vision, stereo processing with cameras and a lot of algorithms for how it models uncertainty onboard, the rover then combines this information with its autonomous algorithm to decide the best path.

Another navigation tool at the team's disposal were the images gathered by the Ingenuity helicopter. “We'd send it ahead to scout out areas and see if we really wanted to send the rover there, and that was very valuable,” said Verma.

The autonomous navigation resulted in Perseverance covering five kilometers in just three weeks, which is “kind of unheard of in planetary robotics terms,” said Verma. And Ingenuity has proven more durable than originally thought. “Ingenuity was supposed to last for three flights,” said Verma. At the time of this publication, that number was 33 flights.

Where Might SCS Go Next?

When asked about finding evidence of past life on Mars, Verma spoke optimistically. “We do think we’re going to find signs of potential past life, that’s kind of why we're there,” she said. “And the probability [that life exists] somewhere in the universe, in the solar system, per se. So, we’re sending increasingly complex instruments that are able to collect information to piece together the puzzle.”

Where to look for that life and where to go next to conduct experiments changes with each scientific discovery. The community of space scientists recently released its Planetary Science Decadal Survey, in which they set the scientific goals of future missions, guiding, in part, what those missions might be. The report identified potential in Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, and the brightest object in the solar system. Covered in ice and with an ocean beneath the ice, Enceladus has plumes coming out of its south pole that could contain material from that ocean.

“That’s a very exciting robotic and autonomous mission, to go there and get something from those plumes,” said Johnson, “because if there’s an ocean, there could potentially be life in the ocean, and if you're sending particles out, you possibly could capture some of that life in those particles. So that's really compelling. That would require new architectures.”

The report also lists Europa, a moon of Jupiter that is also icy and contains a global ocean.

“We have Clipper coming up, which will do a flyby of Europa – that’s a big mission that JPL is working on with other organizations,” said Johnson. “And then there's NASA's push to go back to the Moon.”

In order for humans to land on the Moon and for future robotic landings, ongoing development of terrain relative navigation will be coupled with a technology called hazard detection and avoidance, where you build a map of the ground to identify hazards you can't see from orbit.

Newman, Johnson and Verma all pointed to their time at SCS as being highly influential on their careers, and for enhancing their concept of working on teams — especially complex and diverse teams like they encounter at JPL.

“You get to work with experts in a variety of fields who all work together,” said Verma. “On that landing day, you feel the sense of teamwork. So, if you like working with a set of people toward a common purpose, the purpose is important … but it’s also a lot of fun to work with people who are all very good at what they do.”