🚀 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
			     16-Feb-1995

   The first day of lunar science simulations (and the fourth day overall
   of Marsokhod field tests) saw another six hours of remote control from
   NASA Ames Research Center. The science team under the direction of Dr.
   Jeff Taylor of the University of Hawaii had the rover traverse some of
   the same general terrain as the first day of Mars tests before heading
   out on to some much more difficult laval flows. Primary differences
   from the Mars simulations included live stereoscopic video, a pan-tilt
   unit and calibrated data from an on-board compass. The weather was
   perfect and operations were nominal after some final re-configuing of
   the various video feeds in the field.
   
   Two more days of lunar testing near the Kilauea are scheduled before
   the site team begins preparations for deploying the rover down on the
   lava plateau near the ocean for the JASON Expedition that begins live
   broadcasts on 27 February. The science team has a particularly
   challenging route planned for tomorrow's (Friday) tests, with the
   intention of driving it down some steep slopes late in the afternoon.
   Because of the hectic pace since arrival, the decision has been made
   to delay start-up until 10 a.m. local time, which will give the
   science team some time to analyze today's results and the field team
   some needed rest.
   
   The data from the on-board cameras and the Kodak 420 Digital Camera
   System is now showing up on the Ames, McDonnell Douglas and JASON home
   pages. Additionally, NASA TV is carrying the live video feed at
   varying times.
   
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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