News Release
The Ultimate Mission-Critical Intelligent System: Fourth Generation Mars Rover Running Wind River Technology
ALAMEDA, CA — Feb. 2, 2021 — Wind River® congratulates NASA JPL on its successful and historic Perseverance landing!
This is the fourth Rover (intelligent system) on Mars running VxWorks, if you count Pathfinder (VxWorks controlled the rover rather than being on board the rover). Curiosity has now been on Mars doing some amazing science for over 3000 sols (8 years), which is impressive – it will be interesting to see if it can pass Opportunity’s record of over 15 years and over 28 miles of roving!
Intelligent systems on the Mars Perseverance Rover learned a lot from Curiosity, and built on the heritage of that design. The similarities are there to be seen, the entry, descent and landing (EDL) process is similar – from atmospheric entry, to parachute, to powered descent, to sky crane, to touchdown. As with Curiosity the telemetry relayed back to mission control was there as well.
Perseverance is the ultimate intelligent system. The “brains” of the rover were much more autonomous, taking photos and doing image comparisons to pick the best landing site for example. The dashboard at mission control also had been upgraded to show each step of the EDL phase as it was confirmed, almost walking through a live dashboard of events as they happened. We say almost as the transmission delay is still around 11 minutes….
It was obvious the digital feedback loop on this mission was far advanced than what we had in previous missions. This still did not guarantee the success of the mission as many factors have to come together perfectly for that to happen, and NASA pulled this off perfectly.
In terms of surface operations, this continues with enhancement to autonomous driving and the digital feedback loop. From the NASA web site “Perseverance generates constant engineering, housekeeping and analysis telemetry and periodic event reports that are stored for eventual transmission once the flight team requests the information from the rover.” The internals of the Rover also have a second robotic arm, acting as a “lab assistant” the external arm, managing the samples and supplying the external arm with new sample tubes.
Perseverance is also part of an even bigger story. It has its own mission, to look for signs of ancient microbial life. But it also has a mission to collect and seal samples of Martian rock and soil, for collection and return to Earth by a future mission. It also has the MOXIE experiment to see if it can produce oxygen from raw materials on Mars, paving the way for future human exploration.
And we can’t forget the Ingenuity helicopter. This is a technology demonstrator to test power flight on Mars aiming for one or more flights in the first 30 days on Mars. Unlike the main computers on Perseverance, the helicopter is flying a much more powerful processor, similar to those found in cell phones. These are not designed for the harsh environment of Mars and so it will be interesting to see how it performs.
All of this was also achieved in the face of the global pandemic. Perseverance launch mid-2020 and social distancing rule were obvious at mission control as the EDL took place. Although the celebration was somewhat muted by this, it was still quite an experience to listen to the EDL live and see the excitement and nerves first-hand, followed by the successful landing!
This milestone is a true testament of Wind River’s mission of enabling our customers to solve the world’s hardest problems and realize the digital future of the planet with mission-critical intelligent systems where security, reliability, and safety are not optional. As we like to say here, when it matters it runs on Wind River.
Well done NASA, Wind River is proud to celebrate this achievement with you and we look forward to the science that is about to start!
About Wind River
Wind River is a global leader in delivering software for the intelligent edge. The company’s technology has been powering the safest, most secure devices in the world since 1981 and is found in billions of products. Wind River offers a comprehensive portfolio, supported by world-class global professional services and support and a broad partner ecosystem. Wind River software and expertise are accelerating digital transformation of mission-critical intelligent systems that will increasingly demand greater compute and AI capabilities while delivering the highest levels of security, safety, and reliability. To learn more, visit Wind River at www.windriver.com.
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Jenny Suh
Wind River
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