NASA’s Perseverance rover has been running into issues with its autonomous navigation systems on Mars, wherein its systems required guidance from Earth to determine its precise location. While its onboard systems can determine the general area where it’s at, it still needs guidance from human controllers to avoid dangerous terrain. This did not prevent Perseverance from exploring the red planet, but it has seriously hampered its autonomous range. That’s because even though communication between the two planets usually takes about 24 minutes on average, NASA said that it can only phone home once a day to know where exactly it is.
What the rover would do is to take panoramic photos of its surroundings. It would then feed the data to the SoC and convert it into a bird’s eye view of its surroundings, after which it would compare that with satellite terrain maps taken from orbiting spacecraft. By matching the converted 360-degree photo with overhead images from the satellite, it can then pinpoint its exact location on the planet’s surface. NASA calls this technology Mars Global Localization, and it serves as a substitute for GPS without requiring a constellation of 24 satellites.
“This is kind of like giving the rover GPS. Now it can determine its own location on Mars,” said Vandi Verma of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It means the rover will be able to drive for much longer distances autonomously, so we’ll explore more of the planet and get more science. And it could be used by almost any other rover traveling fast and far.”
Although this isn’t the first time that NASA engineers worked at planetary distances, it still remains an astounding feat to be able to successfully reprogram a spacecraft while being hundreds of millions of miles away from it. This is exactly what the space agency achieved when its Voyager 1 spacecraft, which launched in 1977, encountered an error in deep space. When its memory module finally failed after traveling for over 45 years, the engineers were able to devise a way to bypass the errant chip and continue operating the spacecraft. And, as of late 2025, it has now reached one light-day — meaning it takes 24 hours to send commands to the probe, and another 24 hours to receive a response — making it the farthest man-made object from Earth.
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