Channel 9 on Mars: Inside the Mars Exploration Mission - Past, Present and Future
- Posted: Nov 17, 2008 at 9:33 AM
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- 16 Comments
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While in LA for
PDC2008, we were lucky enough to get the chance to head down to Pasadena for a tour and interview at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Nic Fillingham and I grabbed a cab and met up with the great Marc
Mercuri (of
RoboChamps fame), DPE's VP Walid Abu-Hadba and others to get a look at the JPL Mars Rover facility and meet some of the folks behind the
Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Our guide was the venerable Dave Lavery who is the Program Executive for
Solar System Exploration at
NASA.
This is a fascinating glimpse into the world of solar system exploration from the perspective of robotics and software design (Dave was a major contributor to the robotics design and development efforts behind (and in) the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity).
Tune in and learn about some of the challenges of developing autonomous machines that you will never get to touch again (think about the reduncancy requirements for a robot rover that is deployed 100 million miles away from Earth...). It's really exciting that the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity will be joined on the red planet by a new mobile robot equipped with an advanced laboratory capable of unparalleled experimentation and analysis. The folks at JPL think 100 million miles outside of the box!
This is a fascinating glimpse into the world of solar system exploration from the perspective of robotics and software design (Dave was a major contributor to the robotics design and development efforts behind (and in) the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity).
Tune in and learn about some of the challenges of developing autonomous machines that you will never get to touch again (think about the reduncancy requirements for a robot rover that is deployed 100 million miles away from Earth...). It's really exciting that the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity will be joined on the red planet by a new mobile robot equipped with an advanced laboratory capable of unparalleled experimentation and analysis. The folks at JPL think 100 million miles outside of the box!
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Cool vid. I wonder, will the new rover have a way to remove a wheel (i.e. exploding bolts) if it jams up? Will they be using Robotics Studio at all? At the end, what money did he owe you Charles?
NASA should create a retail mars rover with robotic studio as the software platform and sell it. Good way to raise money for the project and good education for kids and adults. Could integrate the hw with an Xbox game with missions and 3d landscapes extruded from the 2d pictures. Now if I can just figure out how to incorporate guitar hero into a mission...
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Sven is going to love this one
Me too. Thanks Charles.
A technical note about the video: I found having the voices separated (Charles in the left channel and Dave Lavery in the right channel) to be very distracting. If you look at professional video, even hollywood movies, they almost never put voices in the side channels (and if they do, it's for a short time only and usually a character that's off screen). Voice needs to be in the center pretty much always.
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I was thinking about the stuff that we discussed here yesterday in the evening. There must be quite a storage on the rovers. Imagine they do their work and are on the side of Mars that's not focusing to earth. They need to store the data until they get contact again. I know that there's a relay station in orbit - it might be that they buffer the data there but I'm not sure.
These projects are faced very interesting problems!
It not the packet lost, it's the latency! You're looking at 6.5 minutes just to get an ACK back before you send any data!
Their datarate is 256Kbits/s max when relayed via the Odyssey orbiter, their direct link is something like 2Kbits/s
BTW this is kind of intreasting http://hobbiton.thisside.net/rovermanual/
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