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Software Patch Fixes Mars Curiosity Rover's Auto-focus Glitch

Posted by Soulskill on from the careful-with-those-semi-colons dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory have successfully uploaded and applied a software patch to NASA's Curiosity Rover on Mars. The patch fixes a focusing problem that cropped up in November when the laser that helps to focus one of its cameras failed. "Without this laser rangefinder, the ChemCam instrument was somewhat blind," said Roger Wiens, ChemCam principal investigator at Los Alamos. "The main laser that creates flashes of plasma when it analyzes rocks and soils up to 25 feet [7.6 meters] from the rover was not affected, but the laser analyses only work when the telescope projecting the laser light to the target is in focus." Before the fix, scientists had to shoot images at nine different focus settings to distill a decent set of data. Now, they say the new software results in better images in a single shot than even before the laser broke down. The program that runs the instrument is only 40 kilobytes in size.

3 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Not a fix... by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 5, Informative

    ..but an improved workaround.

    If I read the article(s) correctly, problem was caused by failure of a small 2nd laser used for range finding. It seems that failure wasn't solved. Permanently out of action? Who knows.

    Workaround was to take several shots at different focus settings, and have home base sort out the data. Improved workaround is to take several shots at different focus settings, have software on-site figure out which are the best, and only send that data back home.

  2. Re:Still a hack, but way better than nothing. by citizenr · · Score: 3, Informative

    so it sounds like a simple FFT to pick one with biggest high frequency coefficients. You can do it yourself smapping pictures at different focus and simply comparing file sizes: better focus = finer detail = more high frequency content = more information to store. Think JPG Quantization table and quality setting.

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  3. Re:Still a hack, but way better than nothing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    And more importantly, it saves a lot of power. The MMRTG power supply is supposed to last 14 years. However, that's at very low consumption levels

    RTGs do not work that way; they're decaying whether you use the energy or not.