Self-steering rover for alien worlds

Six intense months of work culminated in a self-steering rover charting its own course through Chile’s Mars-like Atacama Desert. Innovative R&D projects can be run in innovative ways: ESA’s long-running StarTiger initiative gathers together a highly able team and sets them a challenge, in this case to develop methods for a long-range rover to navigate its way across many kilometres of an alien planet’s surface. Codenamed ‘Seeker’, the project was led and hosted for ESA by the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.