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

Volume

2

fYear

2000

fDate

2000

Firstpage

2025

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;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Robotics and Automation, 2000. Proceedings. ICRA '00. IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

San Francisco, CA

ISSN

1050-4729

Print_ISBN

0-7803-5886-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ROBOT.2000.844892

Filename

844892