[meteorite-list] As Mars Mission Turns To Remote Operations, Cornell's Marslab Takes on Major New Role

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/July04/Mars.uplinkteam.deb.html

As Mars mission turns to remote operations, Cornell's MarsLab takes 
on major new role

FOR RELEASE:  July 14, 2004

Contact: David Brand
Office: 607-255-3651
E-mail: deb27 at cornell.edu


PASADENA, Calif. -- Since the beginning of January the Cornell 
University team running the panoramic cameras, or Pancams, on the two 
Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, has been largely functioning out 
of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. That's where 
instructions are uplinked, or sent, to the two roving vehicles.

But as the mission ages -- in April NASA extended its life until at 
least mid-September -- demand is growing for space at JPL for other 
missions, such as Deep Impact and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. 
(Both missions also have Cornell involvement; the first studies the 
interior of a comet, the second will get even higher-resolution 
orbital data on Mars.) In addition, the Mars science  team members 
need to get back to their universities.

As a result, the MarsLab at Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y., is gradually 
taking on a new mission: actually generating the instructions for 
uplink directly to the two twin-lensed panoramic cameras atop each 
rover's mast.

For some months the MarsLab -- the full name is the Cornell 
University Mars Data Analysis Facility -- has been downlinking 
information from the cameras aboard the two rovers, as well as 
carrying out daily health monitoring of the cameras. That means that 
the lab receives the image data concurrently with JPL and, using 
Cornell-developed software, calibrates and assembles the elegant, 
breathtaking mosaics that scan craters, rock-strewn horizons and 
distant hills.

"At JPL we work with all the scientists on the mission to pull 
together the daily plan for what to send up to the rovers," says Jim 
Bell, associate professor of astronomy at Cornell who leads the 
Pancam team. "Our team's specific job is to put the sequences 
together for Pancam. But instead of doing it at JPL, we have the 
tools at Cornell to do the same work, and in the MarsLab our people 
can participate in the daily operations meetings either by video link 
or by teleconferencing." A month ago, the MarsLab began these daily 
conferences with mission engineers and scientists at JPL and Arizona 
State University, and these conferences will continue until the 
mission ends -- no one knows quite when. During the week of June 13, 
two of the four Cornell researchers qualified to write uplink 
commands for the Pancams, 2002 Cornell graduates Heather Arneson and 
Miles Johnson, returned to Ithaca to test, for the first time, the 
remote operations of the Pancams on Mars directly from the Cornell 
campus. "It wasn't too bad on the first trial," said Arneson, who is 
now back at JPL with Johnson. "All the tools we have were working 
pretty well. The only issues we have to work out are communications." 
Once away from JPL, she observes, people elsewhere in the mission 
team forgot that the two researchers were in Ithaca, and Arneson and 
Johnson had to resort to phone calls. "We had to be more reactive," 
she recalls.

The Mars team is spending less and less time at JPL. Already Bell and 
senior researcher associate Rob Sullivan are spending only one week a 
month there, and in mid July, Arneson and Johnson will return 
permanently to Ithaca, to give the remote operations another test. 
The third team member, 1998  Cornell graduate Jon Proton, will be 
back in August, by which time it's expected that the MarsLab will 
routinely be uplinking data to the rover cameras. The fourth member, 
research specialist Elaina McCartney, will be the last to return.

The four specialists note a big change since the frenzied, euphoric 
early days of the mission. "We would spend about 12 hours a day here, 
on a good day. Now it's more like six hours, or less," says Arneson. 
"The meetings go really quickly, everything's a lot quicker." Says 
McCartney, "Everything is compressed. We have gotten better at it."

There is a bittersweetness to the atmosphere as this part of the 
mission begins to wind down. On the one hand says Johnson, "there is 
less complexity to what we are doing." On the other hand, notes 
McCartney, when the team was working on Mars time (a Mars day is 24 
hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds, and the two rovers are on opposite 
sides of the planet) there were "endless science discussions while we 
were away in a backroom writing sequences for the spacecraft, and we 
missed out on a lot of that. Now they have joint meetings scheduled 
at a time when people from uplink staff can participate and know what 
is going on."

One thing all of the team members agree on: They will be sorry to say 
good-bye to Southern California. "I love it. It's great," says 
McCartney.

	
Related World Wide Web sites:  The following sites provide 
additional information on this news release.  Some might not be part 
of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over 
their content or availability.

	o JPL: <http://www.jpl.nasa.gov>

	o Cornell Chronicle Mars coverage: 
<http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/rover/rovermenu.html>


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