NASA is hailing the Perseverance rover’s improved ability to pick its own targets as a way of speeding up science on Mars. Without explicit direction from Earth, the Perseverance rover zapped two rock targets with its SuperCam instrument on Sol 442 (18 May 2022) to learn more about their elemental compositions, mission scientists said in an update on 31 May. “Normally when the rover team picks the targets, observations aren’t made until the following day,” Roger Wiens, principal investigator of SuperCam and a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said. “If Perseverance picks its own targets, it can shoot them right after a drive. Having the SuperCam results right away can alert the team to unusual compositions in time to make decisions about further analyses before the rover moves on,” Wiens added.
Perseverance’s software for target selection is called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) and was developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for other rover missions. The software was then adapted for Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument. “AEGIS requests Navigation Camera (Navcam) images to be taken, and it then analyses the images to find rocks and prioritise them for analysis based on size, brightness and several other features,” Wiens said. “It subsequently initiates a sequence in which SuperCam fires its laser to determine the chemical make-up of one or two top-priority targets selected from Navcam images.”