NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover: What Is the AEGIS Software?
One day, in the distant future, perhaps humankind will find a way to settle in Mars. And its success can probably be attributed to the Curiosity rover, which apparently can now do all the exploration and analysis on its own.
Thanks to the Autonomous Exploration for Gathering of Increased Science (AEGIS) software, the Mars rover has been made capable of analyzing chemical compositions of rocks it comes across with an instrument called ChemCam. The android does so by zapping the rocks with a laser, and then processing the gaseous output.
With that in mind, scientists from NASA have been able to gather more data, especially now since its average number of laser firings went up from 256 to 327 per day.
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"There's no ability for people on the Earth to make decisions about what to target," Raymond Francis, the study's lead author, shares in an interview with The Verge. "That decision has to be made on Mars, and now we can make it on Mars. So that makes use of those hours that otherwise you wouldn't have been able to do these kinds of measurements," he added.
The ChemCam has fired over 440,000 times on about 1,500 targets since it was deployed in August 2012. Before the AEGIS software went live, the data had to be sent back to Earth. This process was often hampered by the 20-minute delay to and from Mars. In addition, the red planet is not always in view, given the Earth's continuous rotation.
The AEGIS software is reportedly 93 percent accurate when it comes to finding the rocks that the pool of scientists at NASA wants to study.
More recently, the rover was spotted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The 10-foot-long 9-foot-wide Curiosity was seen trudging up Mount Sharp. It was seen through the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on June 5.
The future of outer space exploration looks promising. Currently, NASA is gearing up for Curiosity's successor, which is expected to launch for a mission in 2020. And according to Francis, the AEGIS software will also power the rover.
More updates should arrive soon.
