New Delhi: The Perseverance rover, NASA's self-driving six-wheeled robot on Mars is preparing to begin a voyage over a crater floor in search of traces of ancient life, the US space agency announced on Friday. 


The rover will wander across the landscape utilising a substantially upgraded auto-navigation system at a top speed of 120 metres per second. This improved technology, known as AutoNav, creates 3D models of the landscape ahead, detects risks, and plots a course around any obstructions without the need for extra guidance from controllers on Earth. 


ALSO READ | Flying Cars By 2030? Hyundai Working On Making Fantasy Into A Reality, Says Auto Giant


"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. 


The Perseverance rover's initial science campaign on the bottom of Jezero Crater was supported by AutoNav, which is thought to be the most important feature of the rover. The team members are looking forward to letting AutoNav drive but will step in when necessary. 


The aim of the mission is to look for traces of life on early Mars if it ever took hold. The rover will collect samples over a 15-kilometer distance before preparing them for collection by a future mission that would return them to Earth for study, according to NASA. 


ALSO READ | Facebook Takes Down 3 Cr Unlawful Content, Instagram Removes 18 Lakh Posts


The rover also uses a method called "visual odometry" to keep track of how far it has travelled from one location to another. Perseverance takes pictures as it goes about, comparing one position to the next to see if it has moved as far as it should have. 


Curiosity, Perseverance's predecessor, was equipped with an older version of AutoNav that allowed it to climb Mount Sharp to the southeast at a speed of around 66 feet or 20 metres per hour. Perseverance, on the other hand, can go at a top speed of 393 feet (120 metres per hour).