🚀 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 (Full Report)
   
   The third day of Marsokhod rover testing here at the Kilauea volcano
   involved the longest traverse of this project to date. On this, the
   last day of the "Mars" mode of operations, the science team located at
   NASA Ames Research Center near San Jose, California drove the
   prototype planetary rover over 500 meters during six hours of testing.
   
   The start of field activities was again delayed, this time because of
   inclement weather in the form of early morning rain. The
   NASA/McDonnell Douglas field team decided to postpone the start of
   today's operations for two hours until 9 a.m. local time to let the
   weather improve. Fortunately, the test site was lower than the Hawaii
   Volcano Observatory, so that it was generally under the cloud bank
   that enveloped the HVO control site for most of the day. Once
   deployed, the rover's data and video links were flawless, validating
   the field team's communication system adjustments from the day before.
   
   After the successful termination of the science operations at 3 p.m.,
   the team extracted the rover from the field (not an easy task, given
   that the vehicle had moved generally directly away from the road) and
   brought it back to HVO for the daily hour-long public demonstration at
   3:30 p.m. The engineers utilized this time to test out the PIN-site
   software that McDonnell Douglas Aerospace has developed to control the
   rover during the upcoming JASON Expedition in Kilauea. MDA engineers
   in Huntington Beach, California both received images from the various
   rover-mounted cameras and sent commands to drive the vehicle on the
   HVO grounds overlooking the caldera. Based on this test, they are now
   lining up several more tests with other JASON participants over the
   next several days to ensure that the software is compatible with the
   network.
   
   Tonight, the work is focusing on re-configuring the rover for lunar
   science mode. This involves moving the stereoscopic camera pair to the
   mast-mounted pan-tilt unit, integrating a mux board for both color
   video and additional channels and wiring in the StereoGraphics video
   compression unit that enables stereo imaging to be transmitted over a
   standard-width video channel. They also opened up one of the wheel
   assemblies for the first time since the rover equipment arrived in
   Hawaii to check out and fix a slipping gear assembly in the drive
   chain.
   
   Tomorrow, the lunar science mode of operations begin a 7 a.m. local
   time. Again, the goal is to reach at least four hours of useful
   operations per day for three days. The lunar-oriented science team
   that has collected at NASA Ames is now under the direction of Dr. Jeff
   Taylor of the University of Hawaii. Concurrently, NASA Johnson Space
   Center will also monitor operations from the Mission Control building
   in Houston, TX, at times taking over direct control of the rover in
   order to assess test procedures that may be employed with a variety of
   candidate scientific instruments.
   
   On other fronts, MDA has just about finished completing the legal
   paperwork needed to license and distribute the rover control and
   simulation software packages that have been developed specifically for
   JASON-related activities (which as mentioned, are undergoing continued
   refinement through tests with the Marsokhod here in Kilauea). These
   run on 486-based PC's and will enable off-site users to remotely
   connect to and operate the Marsokhod vehicle using Internet, the
   WilTel private communications network or even just standard telephone
   lines.
   
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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
-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________
 "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