🚀 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
			     14-Feb-1995

   On the second day of Mars science simulations, the Marsokhod rover
   field team again achieved its daily goal of four hours of operations
   by the remote science team located at NASA Ames Research Center near
   San Jose, California. The weather at the Kilauea test site was perfect
   today, with a clear sky for most of the morning and no precipitation
   at any time.
   
   The day started with the Marsokhod located in the same spot that it
   had reached at the end of yesterday. For those familiar with Kilauea,
   this was along the southwest rift zone, west of the main caldera.
   Despite an on-time start at 7 a.m. local time, the day started slowly
   because of intermittent RF communication problems between the local
   control center in the Hawaii Volcano Observatory tower and the rover
   in the field. It took several hours to track down a bad cable in the
   transceiver station that had been causing intermittent drop-outs in
   the data link to the field. Once corrected, the communication links
   stabilized and enabled more efficient operations than had been
   possible yesterday. Other improvements included an enhanced computer
   software interface for the scientists back at Ames, as well as an
   improved battery management strategy for achieving extended rover
   operations in the field.
   
   Once nominal operations were established, the science team negotiated
   the rover through several extremely difficult maneuvers, including a
   180 degree turn in a narrow crevass. Initial indications are that many
   of the participating scientists now believe that future rover missions
   should include pan-tilt camera pointing and a manipulator arm for
   additional close-up imaging.
   
   After addressing the RF problems, the engineering team continued to
   refine the field operations and identify opportunities for improving
   the Marsokhod's performance. They also deployed the vehicle for the
   daily public demonstration at 3:30 at HVO.
   
   Plans for tomorrow are to finish the third and final day of Mars
   science simulation tests. It is a good bet that the top-priority
   software mods needed to fully integrate the magnetic compass
   instrument will be finished for this phase. The arm control software
   remains the next priority and should be functional in time for the
   lunar science simulations that start on Thursday.
   
   Even after several days of testing, local media interest remains
   strong. Several of the Hawaii television stations have carried news
   stories addressing the rover. The vehicle, along with McDonnell
   Douglas' Dave James, was the main feature on the first page of this
   morning's Hawaii Tribune-Herald. Additional outreach efforts in the
   near future include an on-line computer conference with members of the
   engineering team that is being hosted Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. local
   time by The Planetary Society on the GEnie network. JASON VI
   preparations are expected to start receiving greater atttention later
   this week as more members of the JASON team arrive in Kilauea.

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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