SPACE EXPLORATION
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erseverance made it to Mars, and we all cheered. Years of engineering effort safely flown and gently
deposited on the surface of the red planet, in what was a tense and quite complicated set of entry, descent and landing procedures – described as ‘the seven minutes of terror’ to get Perseverance down to Mars in one piece. Te images returning from the rover
tell their own story, about the imaging community that supplied the sensors, and, in a way, about the history of image sensor development in general. Belgian firm Cmosis built its CMV20000
sensor originally as a custom product for traffic monitoring, releasing it in the summer of 2012, around the time when Perseverance’s predecessor, Curiosity, was touching down on Mars. Perseverance is an upgraded version
of Curiosity. Early in 2013 an internal study looked at ways of modernising the engineering cameras that had flown on Curiosity, as the design of those cameras was then more than 20 years old. It was felt the era of these cameras was coming
to a close, wrote scientists from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in a paper in Space Science Reviews in November1 One of the upgrades was to use the
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CMV20000 20-megapixel sensor in the engineering cameras, the navigation and hazard detection eyes of the rover. Guy Meynants, one of the founders of Cmosis and now working for image sensor firm Photolitics, told Imaging and Machine Vision Europe that JPL initially requested information about the sensors much like any other customer, but at that time the team at Cmosis didn’t know what it would be used for. Ten, later on, ‘we started to get very
specific questions, which came to me,’ Meynants recalled. ‘Tere was some urgency, and I was CTO at Cmosis at the time. It was then that we started to realise it might be used for something like this [the Mars rover].’ Tis was in 2015, around when Cmosis
was taken over by Ams – the CMV20000 sensors are still available from Ams. ‘Initially we didn’t know what it would be used for,
g
‘We started to get very specific questions... It was then we realised it might be used for something like the Mars rover’
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
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