🚀 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
			     10-Feb-1995
   
   As of this Friday afternoon, the implementation of the Marsokhod field
   test operations are well underway. Most of the critical network
   communications equipment was delivered and physically in place by
   Wednesday (2/8) afternoon, while the Marsokhod and associated support
   equipment arrived yesterday.
   
   In the communications area, Keith Brumbaugh (NASA Science Internet)
   and Mike Durbin (EDS) have succeeded in connecting the local control
   station in the observation tower of the Hawaii Volcano Observation to
   the mainland. Specifically, the EDS-supplied Ku-band uplink is
   transmitting compressed video of the Kilauea caldera to the NASA Ames
   Intelligent Mechanisms Lab that will serve as the remote control
   operations center during next week's series of planetary rover science
   tests. Additionally, the digital link is working, with Butler Hine
   logging in from Ames onto the local control computer (termed
   "central") . Karl Pfitzer at McDonnell Douglas - Huntington Beach also
   logged in using the Remote Teleoperations Control Program (RTCP) that
   has been developed for the PIN site operations during the JASON VI
   activities.
   
   As for the rover, it appears that all the Marsokhod hardware survived
   the shipment from McDonnell Douglas' Huntington Beach facility without
   incident, including spare chassis components sent by VNIITransMash in
   St. Petersburg earlier in the week. Hans Thomas (Ames), Greg Loboda
   and Dave James (MDA) have finished putting the vehicle back together
   and are proceeding with final electrical check-out prior to initial
   field checks. The CPU was booted successfully on Friday.
   
   In parallel, Dave Burnett, Dave J. and Hans installed the helical and
   Yagi antennas and associated cabling needed to communicate wit the
   rover once it i in the field. Back in Huntington Beach, Karl and Gary
   continued to refine the basic RTCP as well a the initial version of
   the PC-based GLOVI simulation software. One of the improvements under
   consideration for RTCP is the use of a new wavelet compression
   algorithm originally developed by McDonnell Douglas colleagues in St.
   Louis. This new software promises to improve the speed of image
   transmission over the WilTel digital network when all the PIN sites
   are on-line. As for GLOVI, licensing negotiations are continuing to
   make it available for use at the PIN sites and by other interested
   parties.
   
   The team also took numerous digital photos with the Kodak 420 Digital
   Camera System. Dave Burnett has finished processing them to make them
   a useable file size and will post them shortly on the Ames Artemis
   file server. During the weekend, they will be tied into the Ames and
   MDA home pages.
   
   The field team at HVO presently consists of:
   
   NASA Ames:
   - Daryl Rasmussen
   - Jay Steele
   - Hans Thomas
   
   McDonnell Douglas Aerospace
   - Dave Burnett
   - John Garvey
   - Dave James
   - Greg Loboda
   
   NASA Science Internet
   - Keith Brumbaugh
   
   EDS / JASON Foundation for Education
   - Mike Durbin
   
   A contingent of JASON is scheduled to arrive early next week.
   
   The near-term schedule is:
   
   Saturday, 11 February
   - initial rover operations
   - end-to-end connection between the Ames control center and the
   
   Marsokhod in the field
   - install the updated arm control software
   
   Sunday, 12 February
   - final preparations
   
   Monday, 13 February
   - begin Mars science operations
   
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For additional information on Marsokhod and JASON activities please
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