No they don’t have Shoe Phones or classy secret agent numbers, but the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity got a minty fresh download of brand new software to help them navigate where (we presume) no robot has navigated before.

The software is aimed at boosting their intelligence and independence so that they can roll around the Red Planet with less help from humans.

“We’re teaching an old dog new tricks,” said John Callas, the mission project manager with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA agency in charge of the rovers.

I can hear the girls now: “Who’re you calling OLD!?”

Maybe with the new download they’ll find out what became of the Beagle 2.

Track their progress at the JPL Mars Mission Site and The Mars Rover Blog

[Thank you JPL and Yahoo News and Livejournal and NatGeo and especially Agent 99]

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 11:18 am and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.