Curiosity Rover Driver
The first motorized vehicle that Vandi Verma ever operated was a tractor. “I must’ve been 11 years old at the time,” she told Science. During school vacations, she visited her grandparents in a village in central India. At their farm, her uncle let her take a few turns behind the tractor wheel. Later, as a teenager, her father — a pilot with the Indian Air Force — taught her how to drive a car. That was unusual in India at the time, where those who could afford a car hired a driver.
Today, Verma is one of the few people in the world qualified to drive a vehicle on Mars.
Verma majored in electrical engineering in India and came to the United States to study artificial intelligence. Captivated by the landing of the Sojourner Mars rover in 1997, she decided to apply her engineering skills to space exploration. She pursued a Ph.D. in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and interned at NASA’s Ames Research Center. She also got her first taste of robotic exploration here on Earth by field‑testing a rover in South America’s Atacama Desert.
After graduating in 2005, Verma joined the intelligent systems division at Ames as a research scientist. Later, she moved to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), the command center for Mars rover missions. Her robotics expertise and field‑testing experience won her a chance to drive the Opportunity rover. She drove Opportunity for three years before transitioning to the nuclear‑powered Curiosity rover, which now prowls Mars, examining rocks to determine whether the planet is, or ever was, a suitable habitat for life.
Each day, before shutting down for the frigid Martian night, the rover “calls home,” Verma says. Besides relaying scientific data and images, it sends its precise coordinates. They are downloaded into simulation software Verma helped write, which allows drivers to plan the next day’s route and rehearse tricky maneuvers. Operators may even perform a dry run with a duplicate rover on a sandy replica of Mars in JPL’s Mars Yard. Then the full itinerary is beamed to Curiosity so it can set off purposefully each dawn.
For the first three months after landing, from 5 August to 5 November 2012, the team worked on Mars time. “I loved that we didn’t have to wait long after we uplinked our commands to see the results from Curiosity, and every sol (a Martian day), we were doing something we’d never done before,” Verma recalls.
Curiosity can scoop dirt, drill rock, and hand off samples to its onboard lab. While a sample is being analyzed, Curiosity is already en route to the next site. Verma helped write the code that lets Curiosity juggle these tasks. “We have to drive on to find newer things for the slew of instruments to analyze without compromising the rover hardware or the sample,” she says.
She loves her day‑to‑day responsibility for the machine. “You definitely don’t want to be the one who drove the rover off a cliff! But I find it energizing rather than stressful. You’re completely focused.”
Verma has not left research behind. One of her key goals is to give rovers greater autonomy. She is now working on a software upgrade that will let Curiosity live up to its name — autonomously selecting interesting rocks, stopping mid‑drive to take high‑resolution images or analyze a rock with its laser, without prompting from Earth.
Originally designed for a two‑year mission, Curiosity is still going strong and has already made many scientifically significant finds. “With every drive, we get to explore new terrain that no human has seen in this kind of detail,” Verma says.
Although human spacefaring has stalled, Verma insists the spirit of exploration is alive in space robots. “I am happy to be working in robotics, pushing the envelope on space exploration. We have reached Mars, our neighboring planet. We have only just begun.”
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