Building a robotic vehicle that will eventually travel to another planet is a complicated undertaking. With just one NASA rover, Curiosity, currently roaming around on Mars after the death of Opportunity, the much-hyped Mars 2020 mission takes on even more significance.
Getting it right means testing, tweaking, testing, tweaking, and then testing some more, and NASA just published a new behind-the-scenes look at the intense trial process the rover’s on-board computers have to endure. Tucked away inside a cleanroom at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility, the 2020 mission’s hardware was tasked with landing on a simulated Martian surface that exists only in the spacecraft’s complex computer brain.
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NASA put the electronic brains of the Mars 2020 rover through a torture test originally appeared on BGR.com on Wed, 20 Mar 2019 at 15:52:18 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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