Artificial intelligence is helping scientists to identify minerals within rocks studied by the Perseverance rover.
8 min readIn this time-lapse video of a test conducted at JPL in June 2023, an engineering model of the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover places itself against a rock to collect data.
PIXL, the white instrument at top left, is one of several science tools located on the end of the robotic arm aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover. The Mars rover’s left navcam took the images that make up this composite on March 2, 2021, a spectrometer developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
This image of a rock target nicknamed “Thunderbolt Peak” was created by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover using PIXL, which determines the mineral composition of rocks by zapping them with X-rays. Each blue dot in the image represents a spot where an X-ray hit.Data from Perseverance’s instruments, including PIXL, helps scientists determine when to drill a core of rock and seal it in a titanium metal tube so that it, along with otherbased on their shape and color.
“We have to make adjustments on the scale of micrometers to get the accuracy we need,” Allwood said. “It gets close enough to the rock to raise the hairs on the back of an engineer’s neck.”Once PIXL is in position, another AI system gets the chance to shine. PIXL scans a postage-stamp-size area of a rock, firing an X-ray beam thousands of times to create a grid of microscopic dots. Each dot reveals information about the chemical composition of the minerals present.
High-Tech Computing Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars Mars 2020 Perseverance (Rover) Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS) Robotics Science-Enabling Technology
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