ESA Rover Traverses Its Path In Desert Before ExoMars Mission

European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully tested its seeker rover in Mars-like environment in Chile's Atacama Desert. The folks at ESA developed this planetary rover to operate autonomously and find its way to-and-fro the desert. The rover makes its own decisions in a no-GPS field about finding its path back to the start-point. The team that took up this challenge, gave the rover a stereo vision so that it could build a 3D map of its surroundings. With the help of this map, on which it can track its own position with an accuracy of one meter, it decides how far it has traveled & plans the most efficient route to avoid obstacles.



The team first tested the rover's prototypes indoors and then took it out in the Atacama Desert in May, where it had to go over different kinds of terrain and varying lighting conditions. Finally, the rover became successful in completing ESA's first large-scale test of 5.1km, a little less than the predetermined 6km aim with a maximum speed of 0.9 km/h. This is great because the ExoMars mission that expects the rover to land on Mars in 2018, would want it to travel only 150m per Martian day and not more than three kilometers during the complete mission.