🚀 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
			     20-Feb-1995

   The lunar analogue mode of the Marsokhod Kilauea test ended
   successfully on saturday Feb. 18th at the last science stop of the
   day, after a traverse of approximately 350 meters, on a dramatic
   overlook of terrain dropping away below the rover. This concludes the
   three days of lunar analogue testing, and concludes the science
   testing in general. The rover is now being configured for use by the
   students during the JASON broadcast, which begins on Feb. 27th.
   
   The mars analogue mode of the Marsokhod Kilauea test ended
   successfully on wednesday Feb. 15, with a long traverse of
   approximately 0.75 Km, and 7 science stops. The two modes of the
   field test, mars and lunar, differ mainly in the treatment of the
   images and telemetry from the vehicle. In mars mode, there is no live
   video from the vehicle. Every image is digitized and sent back
   individually over a 112Kbps TCP/IP link, along with the vehicle
   telemetry and all science sensor data. The commands to the rover are
   sent up this link from the control room at NASA Ames Research Center
   to the link station at the Hawaii Volcano Observatory, and then
   relayed to the vehicle approximately 2 Km down in the crater. Lunar
   mode operations, which began thursday, Feb. 16, have in addition to
   the above link a compressed analog video link from the rover, over
   which live video is transmitted. The video is compressed and
   digitized onto a T1 communications link for transmission over the
   satellite back to Ames. These different modes are designed to
   simulate the communications capability of future lunar and mars rover
   missions.
   
   The Marsokhod Kilauea field test began monday, Feb. 13, and ended
   saturday, Feb. 18. There was a public outreach day on monday, Feb.
   20, during which 10 children, ages 5-10, drove the rover. During our
   6 days of science testing, the rover was operated over 30 hours (goal
   was 24), and traversed over 2Km. See the Feb. 18th status report for
   more detailed statistics.

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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