“Fulfilled my childhood dream I’m driving a Rover on a distant planet from your PC, as in a computer game!”, jokes one of the members of the management team of the mission Curiosity Mars. Two days later, after the introduction of a total quarantine, when emptied every room in the jet propulsion Laboratory in southern California, trusted operators organized connection to the control system of the Rover from their apartments. It turned out that there is nothing difficult, except for a couple special moments.
On Mars there is no pandemic and the mission’s Curiosity can’t wait until the disease will take place on Earth. On the nose the most important operation is the drilling of the soil at the point of “Edinburgh”, for which the management of the Rover will connect professionals in various fields. First of all they were sitting in the same room and could talk among themselves and to display reports, graphs, etc available and now, only the process has slowed down – even when you have multiple monitors instead of one, all the options to control problematic.
From the program temporarily eliminated or moved to a later date all manipulations associated with the processing of the 3D data from the surface of Mars, as all of them need special glasses, and they stayed in the laboratory. And schedule had to build another, depending on who and how to work from home. But in General, NASA is optimistic – pandemic coronavirus only confirmed that all the processes in the Department has well established and work continues online.
Source — NASA