NASA Future In-Space Operations: Low-Latency Teleoperations for the Evolvable Mars Campaign
NASA FISO Presentation: Low-Latency Teleoperations for the Evolvable Mars Campaign
“Now available is the September 7, 2016 NASA Future In-Space Operations (FISO) telecon material. The speakers were Mark Lupisella, Jack Bleacher and Michael Wright of NASA GSFC who discussed “Low-Latency Teleoperations for the Evolvable Mars Campaign“.
Note: The audio file and presentation are online and available to download.
Space exploration with low latency telerobotics ? Great idea ! How about testing this out in some suitable place like .. say, Moon, which is 2 light seconds away ?
Maybe send a robot to lunar poles to find some water, lets call it a .. Prospector. Lunar Prospector maybe ( Lunokhod is hard to pronounce ) ? If we look carefully, maybe we’ll find a team ready to do this mission. To top it off, lets send a clone of DEXTRE or two to keep it company and figure out if it can run a teleoperated robot servicing center. Lets call it .. hmm. Maybe a Lunar Robotic Village ?
Lunar Prospector (1998-1999) was an orbiter and the third mission in the Discovery line. Not that I object to reusing names; there is a long naval tradition of doing so.
I actually meant Resource Prospector, which is a mission in the works, but without support and funding.
I was most interested in the fission power system maintenance task. It would be nice to see some additional details on the fission power system.
This is a large team planning a complex mission. The decision to use low latency teleoperation appears to be taken as a starting assumption. In other words, the team was tasked to plan and optimize a wide range of tasks using LLT rather than to examine whether it provides advantages consistent with its costs. This is a reasonable strategy if human presence in Mars orbit (and on the surface) is assumed. However even in this situation crew time is extremely expensive. It is not clear to me whether the study fully addressed the tradeoff between LLT and semi-autonomous operation with high-latency (10-20 min) monitoring from Earth.