Laubach Pix Pages
The 1999 Laubach Picnic Was
Saturday July 17, 1999
at Roy Laubach's , On Rt. 309
South of Allentown. PA
.
This is What Sharon is Doing on Mars Project,,
Laubach on Mars
About two months before the Mars
Pathfinder spacecraft was due to land on
the fourth rock from the Sun, the guys in Rover Mission
Control realized
that they needed help. In a short while, they would
be forced to "live
on Martian time", working feverishly overnight to
prepare a new command
sequence to send to Mars each morning to tell the Sojourner
rover what to
do that day. They would be working 14 hour shifts,
with two "rover drivers"
on post at a time...and there was no room for error.
This was the first time
that a mobile robot would be exploring the surface of
another planet--a
distinction which brought with it a whole new way of
thinking about building
command sequences, since mistakes could actually damage the
roving spacecraft.
The answer? Train someone new as a "rover driver",
who could act as backup
and could watch over the shoulders of the two main "drivers"
to catch mistakes
before they reach the Rover on Mars. They also needed
someone who could build
template sequences to make the rush job manageable.
But whom to train? Who
could learn the complicated Rover software in time for
Landing Day?
That's where I came in.
I am Sharon Laubach, and have been
working on my Ph.D. research--designing
new navigation algorithms for Mars rovers--at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory
for the past 16 months. Normally I work with a
prototype rover called Rocky7,
which represents the next generation of rovers after
Sojourner, in JPL's
"MarsYard", an outdoor sandbox built to resemble
the portions of Mars seen by
the Viking landers in the 70's. But now suddenly I
had the opportunity to
work with Sojourner herself, on Mars! I surprised
everyone by coming up to
speed quickly, and passed the final test--isolating a bug
in a test sequence
which had eluded almost everyone else on the team. I
was ready.
>
I was not ready, however, for the glare of publicity after
we landed--and I
doubt anyone on the team really expected the intense public
interest in our
"little" mission! Suddenly we were no
longer engineers just doing a job we
loved...we were cultural icons. We became the subject
of national front page
coverage, the butts of late-night talk show hosts' jokes...our
little rover's
image was mangled in editorial cartoons everywhere... But
underneath it
all, we were proud beyond measure of just how well
everything worked.
There were tears in the eyes of more than a few engineers
on the floor of
Mission Control when those first images of Mars came
streaming down...and
I'll certainly never forget the roar of joy when Sojourner
trundled down that
ramp to leave the first tracks of a mobile spacecraft on
another planet. It
was truly an inspiring experience, and one which I hope to
apply to my
research back on Earth as I turn my sights onto the next
Rover trip to Mars...
Dale Berger:::Loves
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