A top-secret Mars rover test will be exposed Aug. 19 when NASA allows a film crew from San Francisco's Exploratorium to do a live webcast of a prototype robot poking around the desert somewhere in the American West. The Exploratorium is an interactive museum that also conducts astronomy webcasts from around the world.
While the crew members know where they are headed, the site remains a secret to the public and even to most NASA scientists and engineers, officials involved in the project told SPACE.com.
The secrecy keeps potential onlookers away, but more important it allows truly blind tests of remote operation systems. Scientists back at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have no specific knowledge of the test location's Mars-like terrain, so they are forced to operate the rover in conditions that simulate running a robot around the Red Planet.
for about a decade -- have yielded results that are sometimes humorous and always instructive.
An earlier version of FIDO once befuddled its handlers by performing a confused dance in front of a bush. Turns out its twin cameras alternately saw the bush and then saw through it as the rover moved back-and-forth. FIDO, as a JPL scientist later put it, was not programmed to understand bushes because there are no bushes on Mars. The immediate solution was to drape a coat over the plant. Ultimately, this and similar episodes have led to ever-refined software that does a better job identifying the sorts of objects a Mars rover would likely encounter.
No one knows what the newer version of FIDO will do during the webcast, which will be approximately 30 minutes long and involves a crew of six, four on location and two at JPL.
The crew members presently have a rough idea of where they are going and will be directed to the specific site upon arrival. They've been instructed not to divulge the location.
The half-hour show will include animations of Mars rovers, interviews with NASA scientists and a live voice-over, said the Exploratorium's Noel Wanner, who is producing the webcast.
"We will discuss the goals of the test, the design of the Mars rovers, the differences and similarities between Mars and the desert location, the challenges of designing robots for the Mars mission, the scientific instruments on board and what they will do, the challenges of operating the rover 'blind' from millions of miles away," Wanner told SPACE.com.
He likened the remote-control operation to a pilot flying on instruments, when visibility is zero, but with the added frustration of a multi-minute delay in communication with his craft (it can take 16-19 minutes for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars, depending on how far apart the planets are). FIDO, advantageously, moves at a crawl and is trained to stop and wait for instructions whenever it is confused or possibly in danger.
JPL is designing and building the twin
, the progeny of FIDO, in a laboratory at their Pasadena facility.
Each rover will weigh more than 300 pounds and be more capable than any robot that's ever crawled around the Martian surface. Their range will be up to 100 meters (328 feet) per day. Their mission will be to analyze surface material, even cracking rocks open with a novel abrasion tool and imaging the results with the equivalent of a geologist's hand lens.
In addition, a 360-degree camera aboard each rover will see in visible-light color as well as infrared, providing panoramic pictures of Mars for public consumption and scientific investigation.
The secretive desert test of FIDO has been running since Aug. 6.
The webcast will coincide with the final day of testing on Monday, Aug. 19. It will be shown on the web and at the Exploratorium museum beginning at 2 p.m. EDT (11 a.m. PDT). It will be available then and archived for later retrieval at www.exploratorium.edu/marsrover (the URL was not yet live upon publication of this story).
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