NASA turned the International Space Station (ISS) into a command center this month in a first-of-its-kind experiment in which both the technology and the skills needed to remotely operate robots on the Moon, Mars or an asteroid were deployed in a test drive led by NASA's Chris Cassidy.
As the Station's flight engineer, Cassidy remotely controlled a K10 rover located at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. from space.
The robot was commanded to simulate deploying a polyimide-film antenna in a specially built "Roverspace" at the NASA center while Cassidy received telemetry and real-time video from the rover and monitored its reaction to his commands through virtual terrain displays.
According to NASA, the test session was notable for achieving a number of firsts, including the first real-time teleoperation of a planetary rover from the space station and the first use of space station and NASA data networks to connect a crew member's laptop computer to an outdoor robot.
The test also represents the first high-fidelity simulation of a human-robot "waypoint" mission - an Earth-Moon L2 lunar far side telescope deployment concept proposed by experts at the University of Colorado, Boulder and engineering company Lockheed Margin.
Jack Burns, director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute's Lunar University Network for Astrophysics, is a lead advocate of a proposed piloted mission to the Earth-Moon L2 position, which he says could help track down the "cosmic dawn" of the universe that occurred shortly after the Big Bang.
Of the recent Roverspace experiment, Burns said it was "a great success," adding that the team "was thrilled with how smoothly everything went."
Terry Fong, the director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at Ames, said follow-up test sessions between the rover and the ISS are scheduled to take place in late July and early August.
During these upcoming experiments, researchers plan on focusing on completing antenna deployment, inspecting the deployment and studying human-robot interaction, Fong said.
The technology demonstrations will also investigate how communication delays over such large distances could influence an astronaut's ability to take supervisory control of a robot should the machinery find itself in trouble.