🚀 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
   
   After dealing with a number of network configuration and RF
   communications problems, the Marsokhod team in Kilauea was able to get
   the rover operating on the grounds around the Hawaii Volcano
   Observatory today. From the local control center in the HVO
   observation tower, they drove it approximately 50 meters as dusk fell,
   with video from a number of different cameras mounted on the vehicle.
   
   During the day, the team dealt with a variety of issues, ranging from
   laptop computers that needed to be reconfigured for proper TCP/IP
   network connections, to bad connectors in the radio transceivers that
   transmit digital data between the rover and the local network hub. At
   mid-day, Butler Hine at Ames remotely commanded the rover (which was
   connected by hard-wire Etheret) to move from its location in the
   machine shop to a loading dock outside for subsequent transfer to the
   local test area, receiving video from several different cameras in the
   process. Then, after several temporary work-arounds to deal with RF
   issues and some help in analyzing the situation from Mike Durbin of
   EDS, the team NASA/McDonnell Douglas/EDS/HVO team succeeded in getting
   a strong, stable connection between the tower and the rover around 5
   p.m. local time (based on this activity, Mike's preliminary estimate
   is that there will be more than sufficient signal-to-noise margin for
   operations at the actual test site 1.5 miles away). Once the rover
   began operating, there was never any sign of power cut-offs, computer
   resets or overheating during rover traverses.
   
   The plans are to get an early start tomorrow (Sunday, 6 a.m.), with
   initial attention given to developing long-term fixes (i.e. - new
   cable connectors) for the RF anomalies. The team will then conduct an
   end-to-end test with NASA Ames. They will follow that by deploying the
   rover two miles away on the other side of the caldera at a lava flow
   that took place in 1984 to verify the entire communications
   architecture for the science tests (this site has easier access than
   the planned science sites). Depending on the time required for these
   tasks, efforts will then shift to the software needed to operate the
   manipulator and Kodak 420 Digital Camera System. The rover team will
   then close up any remaining action items in preparation for the Mars
   simulation tests that will start Monday morning.
      
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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