PASADENA - After flying more than 350m miles (563m km) from Earth, the Mars rover Curiosity is about to get its driver’s license. Mission control engineers in California will spend the next four days remotely installing new computer software in Curiosity that essentially reorients the brains of the six-wheeled vehicle for maneuvering around the surface of the Red Planet. The nuclear-powered rover, about the size of a small sports car, can only store so much pre-programmed information in its computer module at once, having less on-board memory capacity than a typical cell phone.
Its previous flight-control software was tailored for the complex tasks of atmospheric entry, descent and landing that brought the mobile science lab to a historic touchdown on the floor of a vast, ancient impact basin called Gale Crater earlier this week. A new version of the software, uploaded to Curiosity while it was still en route to Mars, is instead specially designed to let NASA engineers safely drive the rover, operate its robot arm, use its power drill, collect samples, sweep away dust and perform other functions as it goes about its science mission. “Curiosity was born to drive. This software includes the capability for Curiosity to really go out and stretch her wheels,” Benjamin Cichy, the rover’s senior software and systems engineer, told reporters on Friday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles. The new software package will be installed on Curiosity’s main computer and its backup.