Terry Fong is the Human Exploration Telerobotics Project Manager and Director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames Reserch Center in Mountain View, CA. During the NASA Social on Friday, he took a few moments to talk about the mission and the objectives.
Inside a bland grey concrete building at NASA Ames in Mountain View, named the Space Projects Facility, a team was communicating through a complicated secure network to an Astronaut living on the International Space Station. NASA was simulating a mission where a crew and a K10 planetary rover were on the far side of the moon.
A place where communication is made more complex as signals can’t be sent directly back to Earth. A place that few humans have been or seen with their own eyes. A place that is just on the other side of the moon that we see every night from Earth.
In room 203, called the Multi-Mission Ops Center, their objective was to have Astronaut Luca Parmitano control the rover and deploy an antenna on the surface called a roverscape. Was it possible to have no communication with the Mission Control Center (MCC) and have a crew be responsible for driving the rover to complete a task.
Astronaut Stephen Bowen has flown three shuttle missions (STS-126, STS-132, and STS-133), is a retired Captain in the U.S. Navy, a native of Cohasset, MA and a graduate of Cohasset High School. He talked with attendees of the Sample Return Robot Challenge last month.
Bowen said he found the Sample Return Robot Challenge fascinating. The challenge may sound simple: start here, go out and get this thing, and bring it back. But you can’t use GPS or a magnetic compass. So it may be a little more difficult. You have to do all the navigation on board.
Bowen was fascinated with the different ways the teams solve the problem. How they approach a similar problem but come up with different solutions. How they come up with different budgets and have different knowledge bases. Bowen joked that how the robot behaves is a reflection of how the team members think, but to be fair, it really isn’t as linear.
We had the opportunity to ask questions and here is a summary of what Bowen said.
When I attended the NASA Social at WPI last month, I never expected the advice Sam Ortega gave us. That everyone should be curious and ask questions.
Sam Ortega runs the Centennial Challenge Program. He has worked at NASA for 25 years. He started doing structural analysis for experiments in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, doing micro-gravity experiments and getting them ready to fly, and working with scientists to make sure they were functional and would work. He has flown a couple of times in the KC-135A aircraft named the Vomit Comet to test experiments. He has also been a lead engineer for the nozzles on the back end of the solid rocket motors used during the shuttle program.
During the Sample Return Robot Challenge NASA Social, we got to meet and listen to several people from NASA who work at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Dr. Andrew Keys is the Chief Technologist at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). Dr. Keys works with Sam Ortega, the Program Manager for the Sample Return Robot Challenge.
Global Hawk Project Manager Chris Naftel and Northrop Grumman Global Hawk pilots Kent Fuller and Stephen Sipprell talked with participants at the NASA Airborne Earth Science Event about the Global Hawk and its capabilities. Global Hawk was originally developed for the Air Force. They built seven demonstrators that were tested at Edwards Air Force Base. When they were ready to build production airplanes, the demonstrators became available for other uses. NASA requested that the Air Force give them the excess airplanes about five years ago. The 872 was the sixth airplane built. The 871 is the first Global Hawk built. It first flew in 1998.
At the NASA Airborne Earth Science Event I was invited to at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, Ken Jucks, Upper Atmosphere Research Program Manager at NASA Headquarters, spoke to us about the satellites and aircraft that are used to answer science questions.
NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters and former Astronaut John Grunsfeld took time out of his busy schedule at the American Geophysical Union’s meeting on December 4th to talk to attendees of the NASA Social.
Our first stop on the tour was at Apollo Valley where they have a 26-meter and three 34-meter antennas. Apollo Valley was used to support the Apollo manned moon mission program.
