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The coronavirus pandemic has led millions of people worldwide to switch from their usual office to an alternative at home.
NASA, for example, last month instructed all of its employees across the country to work from home in an effort to protect them against the virus and also to help curb its spread.
So how is it working for, say, the team tasked with operating the Mars Curiosity rover? You might think you would need access to all of your advanced equipment to operate a vehicle currently more than 120 million miles from Earth, but, with careful preparation, the work is being done.
In an interesting article on its website, NASA has shed some light on how its Curiosity rover team has been working in the past few weeks, sharing details on how it accomplished a particular task using the distant rover.
Typically based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the team is currently dispersed, with each member working from home. NASA said a recent task involving the rover drilling a rock sample marked the first time that the vehicle’s operations were planned and performed by a team working entirely off-site.
Most of the computer kit could be installed at home, but some parts, for example the high-tech glasses that help the team determine where to drive Curiosity, had to be left on the base as they need additional computing power to operate. The solution? 3D Glasses “Although not as immersive or comfortable as glasses, they work just as well for planning drives and arm movements,” NASA said.
The scheduling of each sequence of actions for Curiosity generally involves up to 20 people in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developing and testing commands while chatting with dozens of others located elsewhere.
“Usually we are all in one room, sharing screens, images and data,” said Alicia Allbaugh, who leads the team. “People talk in small groups and to each other from across the room.” But now, working remotely, they’re doing the same job of holding multiple video conferences at the same time, while using messaging apps to communicate. The head of the science operations team, Carrie Bridge, says she can be found monitoring up to 15 chat channels at once.
The system works well, although planning a day tends to take an hour or two more than normal. NASA said that while the extra time for planning may reduce the number of commands it sends the rover each day, Curiosity is almost as scientifically productive as ever.
It took a while for the team to get used to working together remotely, but Bridge said he always knew everyone would come together to make this happen.
“It is classic, the NASA textbook,” he said. “We are presented with a problem and we find out how to make things work. Mars does not stand still for us; we’re still exploring. “
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