NASA 毅力号火星车创火星行驶距离新纪录，自主驾驶占比达 90%

On 11 October , the Perseverance rover completed a drive that brought its total distance traveled on Mars to 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers). This is a new record for Mars rovers, enabled in large part by Perseverance ’s ability to drive with much more autonomy than its predecessors. Over the past five years, Perseverance ’s autonomy software has been steadily upgraded, and to learn more about how the record was broken and what the future holds for the rover, we spoke with Mark Maimone , the Perseverance Robotic Operations Deputy Team Chief at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who designed and developed the self-driving software for Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. Before we talk about Perseverance, let’s pour one out for the previous record holder, Opportunity , which landed on Mars in January 2004 for a three-month mission and ended its epic journey 15 years later in February 2019. This NASA video compresses Opportunity ’s entire mission into four minutes and gives a poignant sense of the incredible distance that this little rover traveled over its 15-year life on Mars, doing science as it went: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/YouTube Opportunity drove 45.16 kilometers until a planetary-scale dust storm stopped it in its tracks, appropriately enough, in Perseverance Valley. On 18 February 2021, Perseverance joined NASA’s Curiosity rover on the red planet, carrying the Ingenuity helicopter tucked under its belly. Curiosity and Perseverance both ditched Opportunity’ s solar panels for a radioisotope thermoelectric generator . Curiosity has been active on Mars since 2012 . Despite Curiosity’ s nearly 10-year head start, Perseverance is the rover to first break Opportunity ’s record. There are several reasons for Perseverance overtaking Opportunity — ruggedized wheels for one —but the biggest contributor is that Perseverance was built for autonomy . Maimone shares how JPL added enough autonomy for its Mars rover to drive itself from 225 mill

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