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Hawaii Volcano Observatory -- Kilauea, Hawaii
The third day of Marsokhod rover testing here at the Kilauea volcano involved the longest traverse of this project to date. On this, the last day of the "Mars" mode of operations, the science team located at NASA Ames Research Center near San Jose, California drove the prototype planetary rover over 500 meters during six hours of testing.
The start of field activities was again delayed, this time because of inclement weather in the form of early morning rain. The NASA/McDonnell Douglas field team decided to postpone the start of today's operations for two hours until 9 a.m. local time to let the weather improve. Fortunately, the test site was lower than the Hawaii Volcano Observatory, so that it was generally under the cloud bank that enveloped the HVO control site for most of the day. Once deployed, the rover's data and video links were flawless, validating the field team's communication system adjustments from the day before.
After the successful termination of the science operations at 3 p.m., the team extracted the rover from the field (not an easy task, given that the vehicle had moved generally directly away from the road) and brought it back to HVO for the daily hour-long public demonstration at 3:30 p.m. The engineers utilized this time to test out the PIN-site software that McDonnell Douglas Aerospace has developed to control the rover during the upcoming JASON Expedition in Kilauea. MDA engineers in Huntington Beach, California both received images from the various rover-mounted cameras and sent commands to drive the vehicle on the HVO grounds overlooking the caldera. Based on this test, they are now lining up several more tests with other JASON participants over the next several days to ensure that the software is compatible with the network.
Tonight, the work is focusing on re-configuring the rover for lunar science mode. This involves moving the stereoscopic camera pair to the mast-mounted pan-tilt unit, integrating a mux board for both color video and additional channels and wiring in the StereoGraphics video compression unit that enables stereo imaging to be transmitted over a standard-width video channel. They also opened up one of the wheel assemblies for the first time since the rover equipment arrived in Hawaii to check out and fix a slipping gear assembly in the drive chain.
Tomorrow, the lunar science mode of operations begin a 7 a.m. local time. Again, the goal is to reach at least four hours of useful operations per day for three days. The lunar-oriented science team that has collected at NASA Ames is now under the direction of Dr. Jeff Taylor of the University of Hawaii. Concurrently, NASA Johnson Space Center will also monitor operations from the Mission Control building in Houston, TX, at times taking over direct control of the rover in order to assess test procedures that may be employed with a variety of candidate scientific instruments.
On other fronts, MDA has just about finished completing the legal paperwork needed to license and distribute the rover control and simulation software packages that have been developed specifically for JASON-related activities (which as mentioned, are undergoing continued refinement through tests with the Marsokhod here in Kilauea). These run on 486-based PC's and will enable off-site users to remotely connect to and operate the Marsokhod vehicle using Internet, the WilTel private communications network or even just standard telephone lines.
For those interested in watching live operations, NASA TV is now distributing the video uplink for several hours per day (EDS is providing the initial trans-Pacific link to NASA Ames, which then uplinks it for distribution to the entire United States). The times for tomorrow (2/16) are 1-2 and 3-4 p.m. PST (this data is from memory and thus may not be 100% accurate).
Finally, the latest information regarding NASA's Discovery mission awards is still that the announcement is expected sometime next week. The rover team is hoping that its proposal to conduct a lunar rover mission with a future version of the present Marsokhod vehicle is one of those selected.
Garv
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Gene Carl
Feldman
(gene@seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov)
(301) 286-9428
Todd Carlo Viola,
JASON Foundation for Education
(todd@jason.org)