To what extent will each rover operate autonomously compared to commands sent from the JPL mission team?
Mr. McCollum’s 8th grade class Charleston Middle School Charleston, IL Answer: Mr McCollum et al, There are levels of autonomous operation built into the mission design. At the highest level, everything the rovers do is commanded by JPL, but at lower levels, the rovers can execute a large series of commands, and do some decision making, without human interaction. The way the rovers operate you can think of in terms of your standard PC. On the rovers, we have “flight software” that handles most of the basic tasks. That’s the operating system. Then we send up bundles of commands, or “sequences,” that tell the rovers what tasks we want them to carry out, kind of like the program you run in your operating system. Every day, the science and engineering teams look at the data sent back by the rovers. The science teams take what they are seeing, and plan out what science they would like to do next. The engineering team takes those science goals, and plans out how each rover will take the requ
