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How to Drive a Rover

Rover driver Scott Maxwell sat down at circles around two large rocks and a
his computer and called up an image of small crater. He clicked a rover into the
Mars. But the image didn’t look like a middle of the scene and moved it
photo. It had the sharp angles and flat, around. “Now we can sketch out a path
bold colors of a video game. Using his that we want the rover to drive along,”
mouse, Scott started to move the he added.
scene around. The sky was a dusty It looks fun—and easy—but it’s not
butterscotch color—as it is on Mars. so simple. The rover drivers test
The beige areas were parts of the the maneuvers many times before
scene the rover couldn’t see because sending drive commands to the rovers.
its body got in the way. “We can spin it “Part of the game is figuring out what
around,” Scott said—the photo things could possibly go wrong,” said
whirls—“zoom in on things that are Scott. “If something goes wrong and
interesting”—a rock grows large on the you break the rovers, there is no way to
screen—“even mark off areas that we fix them.”
think are dangerous”—Scott drew red

Rover driver Scott Maxwell on his first rover drive: “That night, I lay in bed looking up at
the ceiling and thinking that right at that moment there was a robot on another planet
doing what I told it to do. That was an incredible thrill. That feeling has never left me,
when I’m about to make something happen on my computer. I’m going to reach my hand
across a hundred million miles of empty space and move something on the surface of
another world. I have the coolest job.”
The control room for the rovers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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