🚀 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
			     2-March-1995

Over the last day and a half, rover operations have generally
continued to go smoothly, with the big highlight being this morning's
driving session with ABC's Good Morning America show.  GMA host
Charles Gibson operated the pan-tilt camera system and drove the
vehicle over ten feet during a segment that featured a discussion with
JASON's Dr. Bob Ballard.  To meet the 7:37 a.m. EST scheduled start
for the show (2:37 a.m. here in Hawaii), the on-site team had to get
back in the field at 11:30 p.m. last evening to begin preparations
with the TV production crew.  This was after conducting a typical
JASON day, which starts at 4:00 a.m. for pre-show prep and on-line ops
at 5, 6:30, 8, 9:10 and 11 a.m.

Structurally, the rover is still hanging together, after almost four
full weeks of ongoing field ops.  A number of software mods have been
identified that would more fully utilize on-board sensor capabilities,
but the decision has been made to stay with the current configuration
for the remainder of JASON (one such mod involving inclinometer data
would help prevent the infamous "tacoing" maneuver that has occurred
several times on rough terrain when bus voltage drop-off impacts the
motor control calibrations).

One useful feature of the Williams-developed network comm system
software that ties together the entire JASON operations with their
Primary Interactive Network Sites (PINS) are end-of-the-day evaluation
results.  The Marsokhod has proven to be very popular, as demonstrated
by the data from yesterday's programs (scale of 1 to 5, the latter
being the best).

Astronomy      2.5
Biology        3.00
Geology        3.85
Io             1.70
Lava Crane     2.74
Marsokhod      3.42
Spiders        2.21

The top review for Geology reflects the great segment in which field
scientists pull an actual piece of lava from an active flow and
demonstrate its viscosity before quenching it in water.

Upcoming events include driving the rover for the next three days as
part of the regular JASON programs.  The possibility exists for also
doing something in conjunction with a JASON black-tie fund raiser back
on the east coast this coming Saturday (3/4).

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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