NASA and other national space agencies are again focused on lunar exploration, which raises the question of how to best use semi-autonomous rovers to explore the Moon’s surface.
R. Aileen Yingst, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, is leading a group of Mars-rover veterans who are conducting field studies to answer that question.
The scientists are evaluating operational strategies to maximize the scientific return from rover activities. This includes determining the types of instruments the rover should carry and how they should be used to recognize surface features that speak to the Moon’s volcanic history, possible ice formation at its poles, and other geologic questions.
“We’ve done 5 years of semi-autonomous rover operations on Mars, and we have a good day-to-day operational understanding of how that works,” said Yingst, a participating scientist on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. “But there will be some significant changes in those strategies when we have rovers on the Moon, just because of the difference in time lag, among other things.”
Because it takes 40 minutes to radio a martian rover and receive an answer, continuous communication is not possible. This has led scientists to upload the operational sequences for up to three days of rover activities in a single message. The rover then operates independently for that time period.
