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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2018

Incorporating AEGIS Autonomous Science into Mars Science Laboratory Rover Mission Operations

The AEGIS (Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science) intelligent targeting software system has been in use on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission since 2016. The system allows on-board autonomous selection of targets for the ChemCam remote geochemistry instrument based on analysis of images taken by the rover. This paper describes the deployment of AEGIS to MSL and the operational use of the system since rollout to science operations in May of 2016.

Deflores, Lauren↗
NASA NTRS2002

CIP Training Manual: Collaborative Information Portal Advance Training Information for Field Test Participants

The Collaborative Information Portal (CIP) is a web-based information management and retrieval system. Its purpose is to provide users at MER (Mars Exploration Rover) mission operations with easy access to a broad range of mission data and products and contextual information such as the current operations schedule. The CIP web-server provides this content in a user customizable web-portal environment. Since CIP is still under development, only a subset of the full feature set will be available for the EDO field test. The CIP web-portal will be accessed through a standard web browser. CIP is intended to be intuitive and simple to use, however, at the training session, users will receive a one to two page reference guide, which should aid them in using CIP. Users must provide their own computers for accessing CIP during the field test. These computers should be configured with Java 1.3 and a Java 2 enabled browser. Macintosh computers should be running OS 10.1.3 or later. Classic Mac OS (OS 9) is not supported. For more information please read section 7.3 in the FIASCO Rover Science Operations Test Mission Plan. Several screen shots of the Beta Release of CIP are shown on the following pages.

Schreiner, John↗
NASA NTRS2005

Automated generation of image products for Mars Exploration Rover Mission tactical operations

This paper will discuss, from design to implementation, the methodologies applied to MIPL's automated pipeline processing as a 'system of systems' integrated with the MER GDS. Overviews of the interconnected product generating systems will also be provided with emphasis on interdependencies, including those for a) geometric rectificationn of camera lens distortions, b) generation of stereo disparity, c) derivation of 3-dimensional coordinates in XYZ space, d) generation of unified terrain meshes, e) camera-to-target ranging (distance) and f) multi-image mosaicking.

products↗
NASA NTRS2000

Automated rover sequence report generation

A web-based rover mission operations report and its various elements are described. The system was used for documentation of the Field Integrated Development and Operations (FIDO) rover May 2000 field test and results from the field test are provided. Implementation of automated sequence report generation for the operations report is explained in detail.

rovers mission operations↗
NASA NTRS2022

Lunar Rover Localization Using Craters as Landmarks

Onboard localization capabilities for planetary rovers to date have used relative navigation, by integrating combinations of wheel odometry, visual odometry, and inertial measurements during each drive to track position relative to the start of each drive. At the end of each drive, a “ground-in-the-loop” (GITL) interaction is used to get a position update from human operators in a more global reference frame, such as a map frame defined by orbital reconnaissance imaging of a large region around the rover’s current position. For Mars rovers, this typically has involved downlinking imagery from the rover mast cameras and using interactive visualization tools on Earth to register such images to the orbital reconnaissance images. For safety purposes, rover mission operations typically specify “keep out zones”, which human operators recognize as being unsafe in the orbital images. Autonomous rover drives are limited in distance so that accumulated relative navigation error does not risk the possibility of the rover driving into a keep out zone. The allowable autonomous drive distance in this mode of operation depends on the distribution of keep out zones and the accuracy of relative navigation; in practice, drive limits of a few hundred meters between GITL cycles are to be expected. Several rover mission concepts have recently been studied that require much longer drives between GITL cycles, particularly for the Moon. This includes lunar rover mission concepts that involve (1) driving mostly in sunlight at low latitudes, (2) driving in permanently shadowed regions near the south pole, and (3) a mixture of day and night driving in mid-latitudes. These concepts include total traverse distance requirements of up to 1,800 km in 4 Earth years, with individual drives of several kilometers between stops for downlink. These concepts require greater autonomy to minimize GITL cycles to enable such large range; onboard global localization is a key element of such autonomy. Multiple techniques have been studied in the past for onboard rover global localization, including radio navigation aiding from an orbiter, recognizing horizon landmarks that are known in a regional elevation map, and correlating a local elevation map created onboard the rover with a regional elevation map. These techniques all have drawbacks, including requiring an expensive extra mission element (navigation orbiter), unavailability of sufficient regional elevation map data, or limited accuracy in resulting position estimates (e.g. a few hundred meters with horizon landmarks). For the Moon, the ubiquitous craters offer another possibility, which involves mapping craters from orbit, then recognizing crater landmarks with cameras and/or a lidar onboard the rover. This approach is applicable everywhere on the Moon, does not require high resolution stereo imaging from orbit as some other approaches do, and has potential to enable position knowledge with order of 10 m accuracy at all times. This paper will provide more detail on our technical approach to crater-based lunar rover localization and will present initial results on crater detection using 3-D point cloud data from onboard lidar or stereo cameras and using shading cues in monocular onboard imagery.

Ono, M.↗
NASA NTRS2000

An Operations System for a Planetary Rover Prototype

A distributed operations system, the Web Interface for Telescience (WITS), is being developed for use in future planetary lander and rover mission operations.

Ground operations manipulator control Internet pla↗
NASA NTRS2005

Mixed-Initiative Planning in MAPGEN: Capabilities and Shortcomings

MAPGEN (Mixed-initiative Activity Plan GENerator) is a mixed-initiative system that employs automated constraint-based planning, scheduling, and temporal reasoning to assist the Mars Exploration Rover mission operations staff in generating the daily activity plans. This paper describes the mixed-initiative capabilities of MAPGEN, identifies shortcomings with the deployed system, and discusses ongoing work to address some of these shortcomings.

Bresina, John L.↗
NASA NTRS2013

The Preparation for and Execution of Engineering Operations for the Mars Curiosity Rover Mission

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover mission is the most complex and scientifically packed rover that has ever been operated on the surface of Mars. The preparation leading up to the surface mission involved various tests, contingency planning and integration of plans between various teams and scientists for determining how operation of the spacecraft (s/c) would be facilitated. In addition, a focused set of initial set of health checks needed to be defined and created in order to ensure successful operation of rover subsystems before embarking on a two year science journey. This paper will define the role and responsibilities of the Engineering Operations team, the process involved in preparing the team for rover surface operations, the predefined engineering activities performed during the early portion of the mission, and the evaluation process used for initial and day to day spacecraft operational assessment.

Mars↗
NASA NTRS2014

Real-Time Science Operations to Support a Lunar Polar Volatiles Rover Mission

Future human exploration of the Moon will likely rely on in situ resource utilization (ISRU) to enable long duration lunar missions. Prior to utilizing ISRU on the Moon, the natural resources (in this case lunar volatiles) must be identified and characterized, and ISRU demonstrated on the lunar surface. To enable future uses of ISRU, NASA and the CSA are developing a lunar rover payload that can (1) locate near subsurface volatiles, (2) excavate and analyze samples of the volatile-bearing regolith, and (3) demonstrate the form, extractability and usefulness of the materials. Such investigations are important both for ISRU purposes and for understanding the scientific nature of these intriguing lunar volatile deposits. Temperature models and orbital data suggest near surface volatile concentrations may exist at briefly lit lunar polar locations outside persistently shadowed regions. A lunar rover could be remotely operated at some of these locations for the approx. 2-14 days of expected sunlight at relatively low cost. Due to the limited operational time available, both science and rover operations decisions must be made in real time, requiring immediate situational awareness, data analysis, and decision support tools. Given these constraints, such a mission requires a new concept of operations. In this paper we outline the results and lessons learned from an analog field campaign in July 2012 which tested operations for a lunar polar rover concept. A rover was operated in the analog environment of Hawaii by an off-site Flight Control Center, a rover navigation center in Canada, a Science Backroom at NASA Ames Research Center in California, and support teams at NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas and NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. We find that this type of mission requires highly efficient, real time, remotely operated rover operations to enable low cost, scientifically relevant exploration of the distribution and nature of lunar polar volatiles. The field demonstration illustrated the need for science operations personnel in constant communications with the flight mission operators and the Science Backroom to provide immediate and continual science support and validation throughout the mission. Specific data analysis tools are also required to enable immediate data monitoring, visualization, and decision making. The field campaign demonstrated that this novel methodology of real-time science operations is possible and applicable to providing important new insights regarding lunar polar volatiles for both science and exploration.

Moon; Volatiles; Rover; Missions↗
NASA NTRS2021

AI4MARS: A Dataset for Terrain-Aware Autonomy on Mars

Deep learning has quickly become a necessity for selfdriving vehicles on Earth. In contrast, the self-driving vehicles on Mars, including NASA’s latest rover, Perseverance, which is planned to land on Mars in February 2021, are still driven by classical machine vision systems. Deep learning capabilities, such as semantic segmentation and object recognition, would substantially benefit the safety and productivity of ongoing and future missions to the red planet. To this end, we created the first large-scale dataset, AI4Mars, for training and validating terrain classification models for Mars, consisting of ~326K semantic segmentation full image labels on 35K images from Curiosity, Opportunity, and Spirit rovers, collected through crowdsourcing. Each image was labeled by ~10 people to ensure greater quality and agreement of the crowdsourced labels. It also includes ~1.5K validation labels annotated by the rover planners and scientists from NASA’s MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) mission, which operates the Curiosity rover, and MER (Mars Exploration Rovers) mission, which operated the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. We trained a DeepLabv3 model on the AI4Mars training dataset and achieved over 96% overall classification accuracy on the test set. The dataset is made publicly available.1

Ono, Hiro↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Real-Time Science Decisioning During High Tempo-High Intensity Mission Operations and the Role of Analogs

Introduction: NASA’s VIPER mission presents a unique operational paradigm within the history of robotic spaceflight. The proximity of the Moon to the Earth and the terrain elements (surface characteristics, light/shadow dynamics, communication links) of the lunar South Polar landing site create unprecedented operational conditions between these two planetary bodies. Apollo era lunar science and exploration included humans in situ to operate instruments and assimilate observational inputs in real-time. Previous lunar orbital missions have worked to operational timescales, e.g., decisional timelines and communication exchanges, that were weeks in length. Mars rover missions have worked to operational timescales, e.g., decisional timelines and communication exchanges between Mars and Earth, that were hours, days, and weeks in length. In the case of the VIPER mission, our operational decisioning for rover driving and instrument commanding will be compressed to minute-scale timeframes. These operational conditions directly impact the manner and speed with which the VIPER Science Team (VST) is required to synthesize and analyze data and produce timely science-driven decisions throughout surface mission operations. The VST shall provide mission enhancing scientific input to guide rover traverse planning and drill site confirmation and selection throughout surface operations. Further, the VST input will be of vital importance to the mission’s ability to maximize science return and to meet broader NASA objectives for future lunar in-situ resource utilization (ISRU)and exploration activities. The VST co-located in the Mission Science Center (MSC) will be responsive to the tactical operational cadence of the Mission Operations Center (MOC) and will provide further strategic and Long-Term Planning (LTP) guidance to the mission. The VIPER Science Operations & Integration(SO&I)team has developed an architecture that is focused on the infusion of science-decisioning into the operational framework and execution cadence of VIPER. NASA analog research has played a significant role in the construction of the VIPER science operations systems. As an example, the SO&I team has led analog missions that have focused on bringing together expertise in the sciences (natural, applied and social) and in operations in service of learning how to build and hold together interdisciplinary work environments and what tools are needed to support high tempo, high intensity integrated decisioning. These experiences have provided an essential foundation of knowledge to the VIPER team. Those analogs that specifically influenced the VIPER science operations construct were identified through a process of comparative analysis to prioritize those that offered relevance in whole or in part, and those that did not. The analog research output that provided extensibility to the VIPER science operations architecture included remote teams of humans and robots in cooperation (synchronous and asynchronous) with simulated earthbound systems, engineering and science teams, and the integrated assembly of tools that supported scientific analysis and data synthesis and provided infrastructure for the remote testing framework. Analogs which included real-time data monitoring, synthesis, visualization and access in a democratized and operationalized manner were of particular interest to the development of the VIPER MSC toolset both in terms of the technology and the processes used to develop the supporting infrastructure. We anticipate that each subsequent mission to the lunar south pole, whether with robots or humans, will be able to optimize science and exploration return by evolving strategies to infuse real-time collaborative science-decisioning. Furthermore, these efforts will result in a foundation for science operations development in support of human-robotic exploration of deep space and Mars. NASA analogs can continue to provide the opportunity to prepare, test and iterate on the operational concepts and tools that will support these ever-expanding space exploration efforts. Our presentation will include an overview of the VIPER Science Operations & Integration development process and specifics on what aspects of analog research have had a significant impact on our work systems.

D S S Lim↗
NASA NTRS2007

Mission Operations of the Mars Exploration Rovers

A document describes a system of processes involved in planning, commanding, and monitoring operations of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity of the Mars Exploration Rover mission. The system is designed to minimize command turnaround time, given that inherent uncertainties in terrain conditions and in successful completion of planned landed spacecraft motions preclude planning of some spacecraft activities until the results of prior activities are known by the ground-based operations team. The processes are partitioned into those (designated as tactical) that must be tied to the Martian clock and those (designated strategic) that can, without loss, be completed in a more leisurely fashion. The tactical processes include assessment of downlinked data, refinement and validation of activity plans, sequencing of commands, and integration and validation of sequences. Strategic processes include communications planning and generation of long-term activity plans. The primary benefit of this partition is to enable the tactical portion of the team to focus solely on tasks that contribute directly to meeting the deadlines for commanding the rover s each sol (1 sol = 1 Martian day) - achieving a turnaround time of 18 hours or less, while facilitating strategic team interactions with other organizations that do not work on a Mars time schedule.

Bass, Deborah↗
NASA NTRS2005

Distributed Operations for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission with the Science Activity Planner

Due to the length of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, most scientists were unable to stay at the central operations facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This created a need for distributed operations software, in the form of the Distributed Science Activity Planner. The distributed architecture saved a considerable amount of money and increased the number of individuals who could be actively involved in the mission, contributing to its success.

collaboration↗