🚀 go-pugleaf

Special Seminar/Info Session
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    RICHARD J. DOYLE, Ph.D., Technical Division Manager,
          Information Technologies and Software Systems,
       Leader, Center for Space Mission Information and Software Systems
  Technology Community
       Leader, Information Technologies, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

    "LAUNCHING COMPUTER SCIENCE INTO SPACE"

    24-Oct-2000
    4:30 pm -- Wean 5409


ABSTRACT
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The development and utilization of new spaceborne capabilities based
in computer science is an essential part of addressing vastly important
strategic technical challenges facing NASA.  We are poised to launch a
new era of solar system exploration characterized by sustained presence,
in-situ science investigations and missions accomplished via multiple
coordinated space platforms.  There is a driving need for increased
efficiency in the return of quality science products to the science
community and to the general public.  These goals are to be
accomplished while managing ongoing constraints of mass, power, cost
and risk.

Autonomy is one of the central capabilities for achieving space
exploration missions that inherently must be accomplished without
the benefit of ongoing ground support.  This constraint may arise
due to control challenges, e.g., small-body rendezvous and precision
landing, or may arise due to mission planning challenges based in
the difficulty of modeling the remote environment at launch time
coupled with the difficulty of communication over extended periods.

Another goal is to extend internet-like capabilities first to Mars,
and then further out into the solar system.  When coupled with virtual
environment technologies, the Mars Network and its descendants can
enable scientist's interactions with remote planetary environments to
occur within an information context of unprecedented richness.  The
same capability can support exciting new tools and infrastructure to
promote hands-on (quite literally) interactions with NASA data in
the home and in educational facilities.

New computing paradigms such as quantum computing are intriguing not
only for their potential to possibly realize exponential speed-up on
some classes of problems, but even more so for their potential to
expand the very definitions of what computation is.  If we generalize
to quantum technologies, there are a number of new concepts under
development with startling potential to increase the performance
of sensors and instruments.

I will survey recent developments in leading-edge computer science
activities at JPL and will map those developments to the set of
near-term future NASA missions that will utilize such capabilities.
I will conclude with a bold look at new kinds of characteristics for
future space systems for the goal of promoting survivability and
evolvability, with inspiration drawn in part from the characteristics
of biological systems.