Dr Vandi is a space roboticist and chief engineer at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and is known for helping design, create and drive the Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance.
Curiosity is a small car-sized rover which has been exploring the climate and geology of Gale crater and Mt Sharp on Mars as part of Nasa’s Mars Science Laboratory mission since August 2012; and the similarly sized Perseverance rover (nicknamed Percy) has been exploring the Jezero crater as part of Nasa’s Mars 2020 mission.
Dr Vandi has worked on Nasa’s Mars Exploration Rover projects since 2008, and said driving the rover was an extremely slow operation because commands took between four minutes and 20 minutes to reach the rover.
"One of the challenges with driving robots on another planet is essentially the time delay, because Mars is so far away that you can’t remote-control it.
"If you hit the brakes, it could be more than 20 minutes before it responds."
Given that the rovers cost about $NZ4 billion each, part of the thrill of driving them was avoiding the possibility of crashing, she said.
"So you really have to be very thoughtful about not getting in a situation that could end the mission."
Dr Verma said a lot of the information and material the rovers were collecting would eventually be brought back to Earth.
"It’s going to take the next decade to bring them back, so that’s why I’m here and really enjoying talking to a lot of the students, because the people who will be the scientists studying these are actually in school right now.
"It’s the next generation that’s going to be studying them."
Dr Verma was in Dunedin yesterday, giving seminars at the University of Otago and Tūhura Otago Museum, about her work driving the rovers, where space exploration is at right now, and where it is going in the future.
