NASA's Perseverance rover to begin search for ancient extraterrestrial life on Mars

New Delhi: National Aeronautical Space Agency's Perseverance rover is beginning an epic journey across a crater floor for the signs of ancient life on the planet.

NASA said the rover team will now be deeply engaged with planning navigation routes, drafting instructions to be beamed up, and will even use special 3D glasses to help map the course. However, it said, the rover will take charge of the drive-by itself, using a powerful auto-navigation system.

According to news reports, the enhanced system is called AutoNav and makes 3D maps of the terrain ahead, identifies hazards, and plans a route around any obstacles without additional direction from controllers back on Earth.

"We have a capability called ‘thinking while driving'. The rover is thinking about the autonomous drive while its wheels are turning,” said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer, rover planner, and driver at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

AutoNav is considered to be the key feature in helping the Perseverance rover in its first science campaign on the floor of Jezero Crater. The team members look forward to letting AutoNav “take the wheel" but will intervene when needed.

The space agency said that the rover might hit a top speed of 393 feet or 120 metres per hour, more than its predecessor, Curiosity, which was equipped with an earlier version of AutoNav that covers about 66 feet or 20 metres per hour as it climbs Mount Sharp to the southeast.

“We sped up AutoNav by four or five times,” said Michael McHenry, the mobility domain lead and part of JPL’s team of rover planners. “We’re driving a lot farther in a lot less time than Curiosity demonstrated.”

When Mars was wetter than today, billions of years ago, this crater was a lake and the Perseverance’s destination is a dried-out river delta at the crater’s edge, the agency said. If life ever existed on the red planet, signs of it might be found there, as per the agency. The rover will gather samples over some 9 miles (15km), prep the samples for collection by a future mission that would take it back to Earth for analysis.