• NASA’s Perseverance Now Autonomously Pinpoints Its Location on Mars How did NASA’s Perseverance gain the ability to find its exact location on Mars without guidance from rover operators on Earth? • Vandi Verma, chief engineer of robotics operations for the mission at JPL, explains. • There is no GPS at the Red Planet, but a new technology called Mars Global Localization lets Perseverance determine precisely where it is - without human help. • Imagine you’re all alone, driving along in a rocky, unforgiving desert with no roads, no map, no GPS, and no more than one phone call a day for someone to inform you exactly where you are. • That’s what NASA’s Perseverance rover has been experiencing since landing on Mars five years ago. • Though it carries time-tested tools for determining its general location, the rover has needed operators on Earth to tell it precisely where it is - until now.

Article Summaries:

  • Imagine you’re all alone, driving along in a rocky, unforgiving desert with no roads, no map, no GPS, and no more than one phone call a day for someone to inform you exactly where you are. That’s what NASA’s Perseverance rover has been experiencing since landing on Mars five years ago. Though it carries time-tested tools for determining its general location, the rover has needed operators on Earth to tell it precisely where it is - until now. A new technology developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California enables Perseverance to figure out its whereabouts without calling

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