🚀 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
			     27-Feb-1995

  On the first day of JASON field operations, the Marsokhod is beginning
  to show signs of structural wear and tear after three weeks of daily
  operations in the rugged environment of the Kilauea volcano.  The lava
  also impacted operations by forcing the team to re-locate the vehicle
  from its initial site before the last scheduled demonstration.

  Over the weekend, the on-site team geared up for today's ops by
  supporting several JASON rehearsal efforts.  These led to the
  identification of a stressed cable harness in the vehicle's power
  system, which may in part be associated with the higher operating
  temperatures that are now being experienced near the lava flows ( at
  times exceeding 120 F as the winds come off the active flows that are
  only tens of feet away from the vehicle).  The situation was nominal
  this morning (5 a.m. HI time) until a bracket connecting the rear axle
  to the chassis failed, rendering the vehicle essentially immobile.
  Student operators at the designated PIN sites in later demos were able
  to control the pan-tilt camera assembly and the manipulator arm.

  A repair for the bracket piece is now under way at a local machine
  shop in Hilo and the plan is to get the rover back into full operation
  by tomorrow (Tuesday).  A key consideration will be the selection of a
  demonstration site that is both educationally challenging and not
  excessively hard on the rover, given that there are still eleven full
  days of operations to go.  Such a selection in turn will have to be
  continually monitored to minimize threats to operations and the
  vehicle itself as the lava flows shift over time.

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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