Curiosity Team Updates Rover’s Software, Plans To Check For Wheel Wear

[Eugene]

Source: redOrbit

Curiosity Team Updates Rover’s Software, Plans To Check For Wheel Wear

December 21, 2013

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Having successfully completed a software upgrade, the team operating NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity now plans to check the vehicle’s wheel for wear-and-tear, officials with the US space agency announced on Friday.

Jim Erickson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), manager of the Mars Science Laboratory project, said that Curiosity is now running version 11 of its flight software. This is the third upgrade since the rover landed on Mars 16 months ago, and it took engineers approximately one week to fully replace the previous version.

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The next task for Erickson and the Curiosity team is to pilot the rover to a fairly smooth area of ground so that they can collect images of the rover’s aluminum wheels. They plan to use the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at the end of the rover’s arm for this task.

“We want to take a full inventory of the condition of the wheels,” Erickson, who served as project manager for NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter for three years prior to joining the rover project in 2011, said in a statement. “Dents and holes were anticipated, but the amount of wear appears to have accelerated in the past month or so.”

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Read more: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113033932/mars-rover-curiosity-wheel-damage-and-software-upgrade-122113/

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. I initially read the headline as.."Rove's" softwear

until I came to "wheel wear"
which stopped me, confused.
Admittedly, the coffee has not kicked in yet...