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- NASA personnel are currently working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic, and this includes the team that is currently piloting the
Rover Curiosity on the surface ofMars . - The team has had to find some creative solutions to overcome the problems of not working in a laboratory equipped with computers, monitors and specialized equipment.
- The team has managed to set things up well enough that Curiosity was able to complete a successful drilling mission while the team worked at home.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Remote work is not much more remote than piloting a robot 140 million miles away on the surface of Mars.
NASA, along with many other workplaces, has had to close its doors during the coronavirus pandemic. For engineers and scientists working in the
Business Insider spoke to two
The rover team successfully piloted the rover from their home 6 days before the NASA office closed.
Alicia Allbaugh has worked inside and outside NASA since 1991, and oversees the 75-person mobile program she has worked on since 2006. When she heard rumors about the pandemic and possible blockades at NPR, she began to develop a plan to determine if El rover team suddenly had to leave. The rover team has had to think of some plans to work from home in the past in case of earthquakes, Allbaugh said.
Fortunately for mobile equipment, some infrastructure already existed as it works with scientists around the world, so a certain degree of teleconferencing functionality was already available. They were able to do an experimental test on March 12, five days before NASA closed their offices.
It took a few hours for all of them to acclimatize to setting up all their windows and chats to fit their home monitor screens. “We discovered it in two to three hours. We were getting into the rhythm and understanding the ebb and flow,” he said. The test went surprisingly well, with the rover successfully receiving and executing a set of commands.
Before NASA issued the order to send its employees home on March 17, Allbaugh had also gone to the office and inventoried all the spare monitors and headphones the team had on hand and what they would have what to ask for. When the news came that employees shouldn’t be back to work the next day, his team grabbed what they needed and headed home.
Recreating complex 3D glasses at home
The Curiosity rover is equipped with 3D cameras, which it uses to send 3D images to its controllers to help determine where to go next. Typically, the team watches these images with special high-tech 3D glasses that change the eye that is looking at the image at a rate of about 60 times per second.
“The reason we have them, in general, is because Rover drivers need to visualize how the Rover moves over the 3D train,” said Matt Gildner, the leader of the rover’s planning team.
Gildner oversees a team of about 20 planners who write and send commands telling the rover where to go. He added that the 3D images give drivers a better idea of how steep a slope can be or how sandy the ground can be.
But the glasses require heavy-duty graphics cards that are normally used in gaming computers, and making them work at home wasn’t going to be practical, so NASA found a less technological solution.
Rover planners now wear simple red-blue plastic glasses, the same type you would use to watch a 3D movie. Gildner says she wears her glasses for about 10 to 15 minutes at a time, about three times a day to see where the vehicle is.
“It really helps us do our job. I mean, we couldn’t do it without him,” he said.
Dual headphones help simulate NASA office
The various groups working at Curiosity are used to being in large rooms where they can easily communicate with each other and meet each other, and simulating this type of communication was a huge challenge for the team.
Generally speaking, the work is divided into uplink (what information NASA is sending to the rover) and downlink (what information the rover is sending to NASA).
“The downlink area where the data looks is similar to what you’ve seen in ‘Apollo 13’ […] with little signs above them all, and they’re looking at information from various systems in the vehicle, “Allbaugh said.
The uplink takes place on a different floor. “[Uplink is] mainly in a really big room that has a lot of computers around the edge, and a very big table in the center with people on laptops as well, “Allbaugh added.
As a planner, Gildner works on the uplink side of the team and said it was a struggle to imitate this flow of communication. “We are used to being able to have everyone in one room and have some conversations within smaller groups in one room, and then some conversations involving everyone,” he said.
Your solution: double headphones.
“What we have done is set up multiple conference calls at once. I will call my team of rover drivers with a headset and we will talk, and I will have that in one ear. And then I will.” being called up to the biggest team group and having that in my second ear. And so I like to silence myself between two conference calls at a time and talk back and forth and do this for about eight hours a day, “he said.
“It makes you a little more exhausted, you have to focus a little more. But it actually worked very well … we are able to imitate what we would be doing if we were all in one place in one conference room, or an operating room, trying to work with different teams, “he added.
Wearing his 3D glasses and his two headphones is what Gildner calls his “super nerd” look. “You also have to do both headphones at the same time, because that’s really key to the whole look,” he said.
Mission accomplished
On March 20, a set of commands that were sent to Curiosity was successfully executed, and the robot drilled a rock sample at a place called “Edinburgh”, and is now heading to another drilling operation looking for rocks to analyze . In total, the robot has rolled 166 meters (545 feet) since its human operators had to set up a home store.
For Gildner, piloting the rover has taken on special meaning during blocking. “One of the great attractions of working in a spacecraft operation, especially on Mars, is that every day we are driving to a new place and I can see images that no human has ever seen before,” he said.
“We all escape to Mars for a few hours each week,” he added, noting that Curiosity’s photos are also uploaded for the public to see, if anyone else wants to escape to Mars.
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