Title :
Internet-based operations for the Mars Polar Lander mission
Author :
Backes, Paul G. ; Tso, Kam S. ; Norris, Jeffrey S. ; Tharp, Gregory K. ; Slostad, Jeffrey T. ; Bonitz, Robert G. ; Ali, Khaled S.
Author_Institution :
Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Technol., Pasadena, CA, USA
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. 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. Results are shown from the January 2000 field test in Death Valley, California
Keywords :
Internet; aerospace robotics; distributed processing; robot vision; stereo image processing; telerobotics; Internet; Mars Polar Lander; Web interface for telescience; distributed ground operations; planetary mission; robot vision; robotic arm; stereo camera; Cameras; Collaboration; Computer architecture; Databases; Downlink; Instruments; Internet; Mars; Robot vision systems; Testing;
Conference_Titel :
Robotics and Automation, 2000. Proceedings. ICRA '00. IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
San Francisco, CA
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-5886-4
DOI :
10.1109/ROBOT.2000.844892
