>>12721170>What's the name of the spacecraft bringing the rover It's just called the cruise stage, it's just the aeroshell attached to a platform equipped with thrusters and a sensor suite. The sensors used for localization are a sun sensor and star scanner. IMU is mainly used for relative orientation, but I think we fuse the data for a more accurate estimate.
>What exactly does the nav system so?When the rover is on the planet, we can't actively control it as the delay between communications means we have no active feedback. Because of this, we have an autonomous navigation system that instead relies on us feeding it a position/orientation objective, and all of it's own onboard hardware finding a way to safely meet those objectives. Key word is safely. Right now we analyze the terrain with our sensor suite, build a 3D elevation map, and forward simulate our dynamics in arcs toward our objective and compare with a maximum risk profile
