One Year of AEGIS Onboard Science on the way to Endeavour Crater

The Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) system enables automated science data collection by a planetary rover. AEGIS was uploaded to the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission Opportunity rover in December 2009 and has since been providing onboard targeting of the MER Panoramic Camera based on scientist-specified objectives. We provide an overview of AEGIS usage over the past year and describe how AEGIS is being used to detect and autonomously collect multiple color images of a variety of science targets during Opportunity's trek to Endeavour crater. During this period, AEGIS has been used to detect examples of outcrop, crater ejecta and cobbles at Meridiani Planum. AEGIS provides onboard rover capabilities for autonomous image analysis and targeted data collection. Prior to AEGIS, targeted data collection with remote sensing instruments required images taken from the rover's current location to be transmitted from the rover to the MER operations team on Earth so that scientists could manually analyze the images to select geologic targets. A new command sequence was then generated and uploaded to execute the requested data collection on a subsequent sol. With AEGIS, scientist input and onboard data analysis techniques are used to select high-quality science targets without requiring communication with the ground team. This approach allows the rover to autonomously select and sequence targeted measurements in an opportunistic fashion at different points along the rover's drive path. While this approach is currently in use with the MER Panoramic camera, it is also particularly applicable for other narrow field-of-view instruments, such as the MER Mini-TES spectrometer, and the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) ChemCam spectrometer.