🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi all,

The following is a status update on the Pele Rover Mission. The Pele
lunar rover mission concept is a proposal developed by a joint team of
the University of Hawaii, NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Johnson
Space Center, McDonnell Douglas Aerospace, the Lavochkin Association,
and Brown University. The mission concept proposes to explore issues
in lunar science and planetary volcanism that were left unanswered by
Apollo. The Pele team is currently conducting field trials with a
Marsokhod rover in the Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii. A major focus of these
tests is to evaluate the use of advanced teleoperations methods (e.g.,
virtual environment based control, high-fidelity stereo video based
telepresence) for operating the rover from geographically distributed
remote control stations.

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		      Pele Mission Status Report
	    Hawaii Volcano Observatory -- Kilauea, Hawaii
			     23-Feb-1995

Since the end of the public demonstration day this past Monday (20 February),
the on-site team in Kilauea has been occupied with re-configuring local rover
ops and the telecommunications architecture for the upcoming JASON Expedition
VI effort, which officially begins this coming Monday (27 February).  The
Marsokhod vehicle itself is in good condition, with most of the initial
operating refinements having been implemented during the first week of science
operations.

By all measurements, the public day was a complete success.  The Hawaii Volcano
Observatory estimated an attendance of 6,000 visitors, many of whom were school
children.  A good fraction of these were given the opportunity to actually
drive the rover from the local control station in the HVO observatory tower. 
Concurrently, back at NASA Ames, media representatives from CNN, several
Bay-area network TV affiliates, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury
News and L.A. Times all had a chance to remotely operate the Marsokhod across
the HVO grounds.  Almost unanimously, the reporters expressed significant
enthusiasm for this rover project and wanted to know when the first actual
mission would take place (several even volunteered to lobby with NASA on our
behalf).  Such first-hand involvement has lead to approximately thirty TV news
stories around the country (including four different CNN segments) and numerous
print articles.

As for the field ops, the team of Dave James and Dave Burnett (MDA), Hans
Thomas, Daryl Rasmussen and Jay Steele (Ames) and Sasha Eremenko (Lavochkin
Association) have been working with JASON representatives from EDS and WilTel
to re-locate the rover and associated support equipment down on the cost near
the live lava flows.  This process was slowed up somewhat because of the
dynamic nature of the lava.  Concern that flows might actually reach their
initial production site lead the JASON crew to move their equipment back up the
road almost a mile at the beginning of the week.

As of yesterday, the rover team had successfully demonstrated the operation of
the Marsokhod at the end of the road where lava had flowed just several weeks
ago.  The TV and telemetry radio links back to the lnew ocal control station
site worked fine.  Concurrently, the team, working with Karl Pfitzer and Gary
Glover back at McDonnell Douglas in Huntington Beach, successfully established
the local "central" workstation that will control the communications with the
various PIN sites.  They also uploaded the latest version of the PIN site
remote ops software.  The latter incorporates the latest modifications for
smooth operations, including wavelet compression technology that originated at
MDA in St. Louis.  Significantly, the folks in Huntington Beach were able to
connect via an Internet gateway to the WilTel network.  This capability means
that it will be relatively easy to respond to JASON requests for minor software
alterations.  Additionally, it will be possible to link in other non-PIN sites
for demonstrations of remote rover operations.

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For additional information on Marsokhod and JASON activities check the
following WWW pages:

NASA Ames Intelligent Mechanisms Group
  http://maas-neotek.arc.nasa.gov/
  http://maas-neotek.arc.nasa.gov/marsokhod

McDonnell Douglas
  http://pat.mdc.com/HB/new/Planetary/planetary.html

JASON Foundation
  http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/JASON.html

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________
 "San Francisco has only one                        Terry Fong <terry@cmu.edu>
  drawback - it's hard to leave..."        Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon
                -- Rudyard Kipling         Pittsburgh, PA 15213   412-268-1416