JPL

NASA's JPL has reported that our beloved robot rovers Spirit and Opportunity are alive and moving after having emerged relatively unscathed from the Martian dust storms. The photograph shows the trail marks from Opportunity's 13m advance towards the Victoria Crater. Spirit meanwhile has driven about 0.5m towards its target, a rock. The solar panels from both robots are generating about 300Wh (watt-hours) of energy per day.

Having emerged from the precarious dust storm, Spirit now becomes the second-longest spacecraft to survive on the Martian surface after Viking I. Spirit has been running faithfully for about 1290 sols (Martian days) while it was only designed to last for 90sols. Viking I is the longest lasting Martian lander with a lifespan of 2245 sols.

NASA's JPL has just released a portion of their robotic software framework to the public. CLARAty (Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy) as the software is called consists, at this time, of 44 modules that can be used for robot pose estimation (position tracking), navigation, locomotion and planning. More of the CLARAty software will be released into the public domain gradually. The software was developed jointly with NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Minnesota. ... continued