The
Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will be conducting numerous scientific campaigns as it searches for signs of life on Mars and acts as a testbed for new technologies (i.e. Mars Ingenuity). NASA scientists are hoping to use Perseverance to look for ancient microbial life, collect core samples for future analysis, attempt to create oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, and search for subsurface water. Managing such a diverse array of science activities is already a daunting task, made even more challenging by the fact that the Perseverance rover is millions of miles away from Earth. Efficient planning will be the key to unlocking the Martian rover’s productivity.
Fortunately for Perseverance mission personnel, a new NASA-made, web-based application has been deployed to optimize the planning process. The Component-based Campaign Planning, Implementation, and Tactical software tool, or COCPIT, enables scientists and engineers to create detailed daily activity plans, while managing multiple constraints such as battery power, information bandwidth, and computational memory. Any inadvertent planning conflicts will automatically be alerted to mission personnel, thus ensuring that scientific activities will continue as planned.
COCPIT was developed in a partnership between NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and NASA's
Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. COCPIT is an extension of Playbook, a web-based software tool built by the Scheduling and Planning Interfaces for Exploration Team from the
Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA Ames.
To read the full story, please visit-
https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8954/life-goals-nasa-software-unlocks-martian-rover-productivity/.