Month: April 2024

Crew 297 – Janus 1 Journalist – David Laude

Today’s two EVAs were simply to seek, find, "hide and seek" again, the mock nuclear power system (NPS). Mission support provided a simulated landing site for the NPS. The Crew Commander (not on requested EVA) gave an approximate landing site, which will be within 1000 feet from the real location. This EVA utilized known searching methods to find the NPS. The morning’s EVA team with both Matts and Sean, sought and found it in less than 10 minutes! Once found, it was collected and a new simulated landing site was selected and recorded for the next EVA crew to recover.

Just after 1PM, Pawel, Dave and Sarah headed north on Cow Dung Road on rovers Opportunity (Oppy) and Spirit. The longer drive than usual allowed more time to indulge one’s vision upon a stark, but remarkable landscape of shapes and Marian soil and rock tones. Lacking was any sense of green, except for an occasional small green patch of mineral tainted regolith sometimes found while on foot.

Reaching our destination, we departed our separate ways to cover a broad section of ground, all of us heading south while spreading out and believing we were at the most northern perimeter of the search area. After about 25 minutes of what seemed like a scenic hike where no person had been before, Pawel discovered the NPS. Once found, the crew continued to explore the region for geological interests.

During the afternoon EVA, Sean had gotten a design for a funnel printing on the 3D printer. A funnel was one item of kitchen utility that we didn’t have. The usefulness of such a printer can not be understated for a moderate to long-term space mission. A funnel is only one of a very large variety of objects that are possible to print.

Crew 297 – Janus 1 Journalist – David Laude

Janus 1’s first double EVA on Sol 4, taken on another beautiful Martian day by two teams of two. One team manned by both Matts worked on burying the nuclear reactor in regolith, while at the same time Pawel and Dave got practice with the robot system provided by Nicholas Conlon of CU Boulder.

The two Matts took turns digging until after 54 minutes of toil they had a hole big enough to hold the entire mock reactor. A few issues came up along the way including Matt’s (does it matter which one?) communications head piece that slid of his head until repositioned. That’s part of the learning in sim experience. Afterwards, they removed the reactor and covered up the hole. We will hear more about the reactor in future reports.

Meanwhile Pawel and Dave set up the mobile robot, named "Case", after a robot from sci-fi movie "Interstellar". The process was long, due to our not having done it before, but it worked the first time. Pawel did the driving from a laptop while Dave walked along with his new friend Case, while watching for obstacles. Case can be programmed from the laptop to drive a particular course, but sometimes Pawel had to manually drive it from his laptop computer.

The main goal of the study with Case is to understand how future astronauts, in current real-world robotic applications, where users rely heavily on telemetry, map data, and intuition in order to infer how competent a robot will be in a given environment. Telemetry can consist of a variety of data, however in our experiments, telemetry will include the robot’s position, heading, velocity, battery level, and other state information. Map data consists of a displayed map with iconography indicating features such as positions of the robot, waypoints, hazards, and other relevant information. This information, while valuable, can be confusing for non-expert users whose mental model of the robot’s competence is incomplete or inaccurate, tedious to follow and monitor, and can lead to poor human decision-making. Instead, this research focuses on developing more human-centered approaches to convey robot competency.

In an unusually productive day, Sean and Matt S. also gave the rest of the crew an introduction to their software based "Toolset for Shared and Long-term Document Management and IT Operations". More on this in a later journalist report.

Today’s person of interest is Executive Officer Matthew Storch. He has B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in computer science from UIUC. He has worked as a software engineer and has held various engineering management positions for 35 years He is currently acting VP Engineering and CTO of a small (30 person) company that is building a specialized physical infrastructure management product (target audience is large corporations and government institutions). Outside of work, Matthew has a long-standing passion for adventure, technical achievement and unusual experiences that has led him to becoming an airplane pilot, a gyroplane pilot, sailboat & powerboat operator, and a submersible pilot.