“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," President John. F. Kennedy, Sept. 12, 1962. The idea of a machine on Mars, thinking for itself, making a range of intelligent decisions in real-time was certainly not part of what was behind Kennedy’s speech some 58 years ago.
getty
Last week, NASA, JPL’s Perseverance successfully landed on Mars. Perseverance is the ultimate intelligent system. It’s 130 million miles from earth so it has to make decisions and actions mostly on its own. The rover must use its "brains" to take photos and determine the best landing site using image comparisons.
According to NASA, “Perseverance generates constant engineering, housekeeping and analysis telemetry, and periodic event reports that are stored for eventual transmission once the flight team requests the information from the rover.”
The internals of the Rover also have a second robotic arm, acting as a “lab assistant” to the external arm, managing the samples and supplying the external arm with new sample tubes. The idea of intelligent systems may in itself sound logical, but the conditions necessary for these systems to exist, thrive and react to somewhat unexpected scenarios is what makes Perseverance the perfect example of an intelligent system; computing, predicting, sensing and eventually connecting from the very farthest edges back to earth.
This is not just an engineering feat, but a dynamic system designed to monitor and choose its landing site on entry, calculating, assessing and adjusting to a better spot. It has a remote helicopter too. All these technologies working together are mission-critical in nature. 130 million miles away makes break fix an impossibility.
Perseverance is also part of an even bigger story. It has its own mission, to look for signs of ancient microbial life. But it also has a mission to collect and seal samples of Martian rock and soil to return to Earth as part of the MOXIE experiment, which will determine if oxygen can be produced from raw materials on Mars, paving the way for future human exploration.
Perseverance will do immensely more work, over much wider distances and under its own intelligent systems. It might take over eleven minutes for signals to come back from Mars to earth, so Perseverance has to compute, sense, predict and work in an intelligent way on its own some 130 million miles away from earth. That’s the power of intelligent systems as they explore and work new worlds and ideas. These ideas and samples from science will come back to earth to hopefully inspire the new machine economy focused on near latency free digital feedback loops to deliver value.
Machines will help us see the possibilities of what is out there. Not just on Mars but inside cars, manufacturing, cobots on farms, in energy exploration and management in truck trains, on ships and in the air. Not just way outside our atmosphere. Perseverance is a wonderful example of machines working in both mission-critical ways and environments to deliver knowledge to advance mankind. This is the fourth Rover (intelligent system) on Mars running with Wind River technology. Curiosity had been on Mars for over 3000 sols (8 years).
Congratulations and well-done NASA, we look forward to the science that is about to start, amplifying the sense of possibilities it will bring to an intelligent systems-first world we will all benefit from. Kennedy may not have fully imagined the power that NASA has bought to the world with its application and development of groundbreaking technologies. Perseverance could be as inspirational to the idea of an intelligent systems world as NASA was to the idea of leaving Earth’s orbit.
