Jeffrey S. Norris

Mission-critical development with open source software: lessons learned

Using open source software components in a mission-critical project not only can keep the project within budget but can also result in a more robust and flexible tool. When considering an open source component, prospective users should evaluate the project for several characteristics: maturity, longevity, and flexibility. For greatest benefit, the users should also build and maintain a strong working relationship with the components developers. We compiled our experiences developing SAP into a developers guide for those considering using open source in their mission-critical application. In addition to discussing how to evaluate open source components suitability for inclusion in a mission-critical application, the guide suggests strategies for working with open source development teams.

Mars Exploration Rover Operations with the Science Activity Planner

The Science Activity Planner (SAP) is the primary science operations tool for the Mars Exploration Rover mission and NASA’s Software of the Year for 2004. SAP utilizes a variety of visualization and planning capabilities to enable the mission operations team to direct the activities of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. This paper outlines some of the challenging requirements that drove the design of SAP and discusses lessons learned from the development and use of SAP in mission operations.

Internet-based operations for the Mars Polar Lander mission

The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) mission was the first planetary mission to use Internet-based distributed ground operations where scientists and engineers collaborate in daily mission operations from multiple geographically distributed locations via the Internet. This paper describes the operations system, the Web interface for telescience (WITS), which was used by the MPL mission for Internet-based operations. WITS was used for generating command sequences for the landers robotic arm and robotic arm camera, and as a secondary tool for sequence generation for the stereo camera on the lander. WITS was also used as a public outreach tool. Results are shown from the January 2000 field test in Death Valley, California.

The science activity planner for the mars exploration rover mission: fido field test results

The science activity planning process for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission was exercised in a ten day terrestrial rover field test in August 2002. A version of the MER mission Science Activity Planner (SAP) tool was used for downlink data visualization and uplink plan generation.

Polyphony: A Workflow Orchestration Framework for Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing has delivered unprecedented compute capacity to NASA missions at affordable rates. Missions like the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) and Mars Science Lab (MSL) are enjoying the elasticity that enables them to leverage hundreds, if not thousands, or machines for short durations without making any hardware procurements. In this paper, we describe Polyphony, a resilient, scalable, and modular framework that efficiently leverages a large set of computing resources to perform parallel computations. Polyphony can employ resources on the cloud, excess capacity on local machines, as well as spare resources on the supercomputing center, and it enables these resources to work in concert to accomplish a common goal. Polyphony is resilient to node failures, even if they occur in the middle of a transaction. We will conclude with an evaluation of a production-ready application built on top of Polyphony to perform image-processing operations of images from around the solar system, including Mars, Saturn, and Titan.

Group collaboration for Mars rover mission operations

Group collaboration capabilities have been developed for Internet-based Mars rover mission operations. Internet-based operations enables scientists to participate in daily Mars rover mission operations from their home institutions. Group collaboration enables geographically separated users to collaboratively analyze downlinked data and plan new activities for the rover. The motivation for group collaboration in Mars rover mission operations and the technologies developed to provide group collaboration are discussed. The group collaboration capability was developed for use in rover mission operations in the 2003 NASA Mars Exploration Rover mission.

Delivering Images for Mars Rover Science Planning

Mars rover images provide essential context for planning science activities. This work describes a method for delivering Mars rover images to operations planners that is highly efficient and scalable. Experimental results of various image compression strategies applied to rover images are given. Next, an adaptive level-of-detail tile-based delivery methodology for images is presented. With a tile-aware image browsing application, images of virtually limitless size may be distributed to participating scientists with great efficiency and thus provide a common collaborative context. This work also describes advances in mosaicking rover images in support of operations planning.

Multi-mission activity planning for Mars lander and rover missions

The Web interface for telescience (WITS) provides downlink data visualization and uplink activity planning for multiple Mars lander and rover missions. WITS also provides a ground data system (GDS) for terrestrial rover operations. The architecture of the WITS system that enables its multi-mission use is described. WITS has been used as the GDS for the Rocky7, FIDO, and Rocky8 rovers at JPL. It was used for command sequence generation for the Mars Polar Lander mission robotic arm and robotic arm camera are to be used for science activity planning in the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. It is also planned for use in the 2007 Phoenix Mars lander mission and 2009 Mars science laboratory (MSL) rover mission. WITS is currently being integrated with the Mission Data System (MDS) for use in the MSL mission and with the coupled layer architecture for robotic autonomy (CLARAty) system for use as the GDS for terrestrial technology development landers and rovers.

Visualization of coregistered imagery for remote surface operations

This work discusses various techniques used in visualizing sets of coregistered images for planetary lander or rover mission operations.

PTEP: the parallel telemetry processor

The Parallel Telemetry Processor (PTEP), a highspeed, robust, and extensible telemetry processing system is discussed in this paper. The system, written in Java, provides a multithreaded task-dispatching framework for downlink processing that allows existing data processing applications to be easily integrated into the processing pipeline. The system provides users with a color-coded flowchart that indicates the progress of packets through the system and displays intermediate data products as they are generated. Packets that cause processing errors are stored in an error queue for later review while the system continues to process new packets. PTEP currently processes telemetry from 7 different instruments on the FIDO prototype Mars rover at JPL, including multiple stereo cameras, a spectrometer, and a microscope. PTEP generates 21 science data products (5 megabytes of data) for every stereo image pair taken by the rover. Throughput is approximately 2 packets per minute, making it possible to process an entire downlink from the rover in minutes.