Marsokhod Planetary Rover Status Report

10 February 1995

Written by John Garvey

Hawaii Volcano Observatory -- Kilauea, Hawaii

As of this Friday afternoon, the implementation of the Marsokhod field test operations are well underway. Most of the critical network communications equipment was delivered and physically in place by Wednesday (2/8) afternoon, while the Marsokhod and associated support equipment arrived yesterday.

In the communications area, Keith Brumbaugh (NASA Science Internet) and Mike Durbin (EDS) have succeeded in connecting the local control station in the observation tower of the Hawaii Volcano Observation to the mainland. Specifically, the EDS-supplied Ku-band uplink is transmitting compressed video of the Kilauea caldera to the NASA Ames Intelligent Mechanisms Lab that will serve as the remote control operations center during next week's series of planetary rover science tests. Additionally, the digital link is working, with Butler Hine logging in from Ames onto the local control computer (termed "central") . Karl Pfitzer at McDonnell Douglas - Huntington Beach also logged in using the Remote Teleoperations Control Program (RTCP) that has been developed for the PIN site operations during the JASON VI activities.

As for the rover, it appears that all the Marsokhod hardware survived the shipment from McDonnell Douglas' Huntington Beach facility without incident, including spare chassis components sent by VNIITransMash in St. Petersburg earlier in the week. Hans Thomas (Ames), Greg Loboda and Dave James (MDA) have finished putting the vehicle back together and are proceeding with final electrical check-out prior to initial field checks. The CPU was booted successfully on Friday.

In parallel, Dave Burnett, Dave J. and Hans installed the helical and Yagi antennas and associated cabling needed to communicate wit the rover once it i in the field. Back in Huntington Beach, Karl and Gary continued to refine the basic RTCP as well a the initial version of the PC-based GLOVI simulation software. One of the improvements under consideration for RTCP is the use of a new wavelet compression algorithm originally developed by McDonnell Douglas colleagues in St. Louis. This new software promises to improve the speed of image transmission over the WilTel digital network when all the PIN sites are on-line. As for GLOVI, licensing negotiations are continuing to make it available for use at the PIN sites and by other interested parties.

The team also took numerous digital photos with the Kodak 420 Digital Camera System. Dave Burnett has finished processing them to make them a useable file size and will post them shortly on the Ames Artemis file server. During the weekend, they will be tied into the Ames and MDA home pages.

The field team at HVO presently consists of: