A major software upgrade installed on NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been under construction for years, will allow the Mars rover to drive faster and reduce wear and tear on its wheels. These are just two of the nearly 180 changes made during the update that required the team to suspend Curiosity’s science and imaging efforts from April 3-7.

“Flight software is critical to our mission, so it’s very important to our team,” said Curiosity project manager Cathy Zamora-Garcia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “This is a major software update and we needed to make sure we got it right.”

Planning for this update dates back to 2016, when Curiosity last received a software update. Some of the changes this time around are as minor as tweaking the messages the rover sends back to mission controllers on Earth. Others simplify computer code, which has been replaced by various patches since Curiosity was released in 2012. The biggest changes will help Curiosity run more efficiently for years to come.

The rover can now do much of what the team calls “think while driving”—something NASA’s newest rover Perseverance can do more efficiently for navigating around rocks and sand traps. As Perseverance drives, it continuously takes pictures of the terrain ahead and processes them with a special computer so it can navigate autonomously for one continuous ride.

Curiosity does not have a dedicated computer for this purpose. Instead, it moves in segments and stops after each segment to process images of the terrain. This means it has to be started and stopped several times during a long ride. The new software will help the venerable rover process images faster and allow him to spend more time on the go.

“This won’t allow Curiosity to move as fast as Perseverance, but instead of stopping for a full minute after a movement segment, we only stop for a second or two,” said Jonathan Denison of JPL, Curiosity’s engineering operations team leader. “Spending less free time between propulsion segments also means we use less energy every day. And despite being almost 11 years old, we continue to implement new ideas to use more of the available energy for scientific activities.”