🚀 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
			     15-Feb-1995

   The mars analogue mode of the Marsokhod Kilauea test has successfully
   ended today, 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 begin 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 will run
   through Saturday, Feb. 18. There will be a public outreach day on
   Monday, Feb. 20.
      
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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