Mars Polar Lander mission distributed operations

Author

Backes, Paul G. ; Tso, Kam S. ; Norris, Jeffrey S. ; Tharp, Gregory K. ; Slostad, Jeffrey T. ; Bonitz, Robert G.

Author_Institution

Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Technol., Pasadena, CA, USA

Volume

2

fYear

2000

fDate

2000

Firstpage

367

Abstract

The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) mission was the first planetary mission to use Internet-based distributed ground operations where scientists and engineers collaborate in daily mission operations from multiple geographically distributed locations via the Internet. This paper describes the operations system, the Web Interface for Telescience (WITS), which was used by the MPL mission for Internet-based operations. The MPL mission was a Lander which landed near the south pole of Mars on December 3, 1999, although communication with the Lander was never achieved. WITS was used for generating command sequences for the Lander´s robotic arm and robotic arm camera, and as a secondary tool for sequence generation for the stereo camera on the Lander. WITS was also used as a public outreach tool

Keywords

Internet; Mars; aerospace control; astronomy computing; computer architecture; data visualisation; image processing equipment; space communication links; telerobotics; user interfaces; 3 December 1999; Internet ground operations; Mars Polar Lander mission; Telescience; Web Interface; command sequences; distributed operations; public outreach tool; sequence generation; stereo camera; Cameras; Collaboration; Data visualization; Downlink; Internet; Mars; NASA; Propulsion; Robot vision systems; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Aerospace Conference Proceedings, 2000 IEEE

Conference_Location

Big Sky, MT

ISSN

1095-323X

Print_ISBN

0-7803-5846-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/AERO.2000.878244

Filename

878244