Keep on Perseverin’

It seems like only yesterday but last week (February 18) marked the one year anniversary of the exciting landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars.  That excitement of that success, where amazingly the rover was put down on the Martian surface using a rocket-propelled sky crane of all things, can be re-lived by watching this short and moving YouTube video put out by JPL.  Dare Mighty Things, indeed!  And what a year it’s been since that spectacular landing.  Since then, the rover has been exploring the Jezero crater and recently has been drilling rocks to obtain samples that will eventually be returned to Earth in a future mission to Mars.  Meanwhile, the rover travelled its longest path in a single day, 320 meters, just a week ago from Monday, and to do so it used special self-driving software called AutoNav that allowed Perseverance to quickly navigate around obstacles in its path.  Furthermore, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter that accompanied Perseverance continued to fly about the rover over the past year, and has made 19 flights so far.  Next, Perseverance will be travelling back near where it landed this summer to explore what appears to be a fossilized river delta, whose sediment could hold signs of ancient life on Mars.  As you can imagine, finding irrefutable evidence of past life will be very tricky.

Relatedly, NASA has partnered with a data-science company called DrivenData to come up with schemes for analyzing the compositions of future samples of Martian rocks, either ones returned to Earth by a future mission or analyzed by future astronauts on the surface itself.  They have just begun a contest in which any adult (not affiliated with the company or agency) worldwide can submit a machine learning algorithm to crack the tricky problem of identifying evidence of past habitability on the Martian surface, i.e., when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and a wetter climate.   The goal here is to figure out how to detect evidence of particular chemicals of astrobiological significance, like nitrogen, sulfur, water, or methane.  A total of US$30K is up for grabs, with half going to the first prize, and the remainder divided among the second and third prizes and yet another “bonus” prize for algorithms of particularly good performance.  The data used for the competition are those obtained from the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument on NASA’s previous Curiosity rover.  Sounds like a great challenge for those who read these daily posts and are particularly interested in machine learning.  (NRC folks should drop me a line first though.)  Here’s the link for those interested in participating in this admittedly novel contest.  Don’t delay - the competition began just last week, and there are only 7 weeks to go!