New Space and Tech

Challenging Engineers To Make a Self-Navigating Mars Bot

By Keith Cowing
April 8, 2013
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ESA Tests Self-steering Rover in ‘Mars’ Desert

“ESA assembled a top engineering team, then challenged them to devise a way for rovers to navigate on alien planets. Six months later, a fully autonomous vehicle was charting its course through Chile’s Mars-like Atacama Desert. May’s full-scale rover field test marked the final stage of a StarTiger project code-named ‘Seeker’. Standing for ‘Space Technology Advancements by Resourceful, Targeted and Innovative Groups of Experts and Researchers’, StarTiger involves a multidisciplinary team gathered at a single site, working against the clock to achieve a technology breakthrough.”

SpaceRef co-founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.