If you think working from home is tough — NASA’s scientists are trying to operate the $2.5 billion Curiosity rover without an office

• It's not just you, even NASA scientists are now working from home.
• The Curiosity rover team is coordinating over video and chat to operate the $2.5 billion piece of machinery.
• Not all the equipment is available, communication is task and distractions are plenty — yet they haven't let that get in their way.

One would think that operating a $2.5 billion piece of equipment is difficult enough but the engineers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are now doing it from home — by driving the Curiosity rover on the Red Planet.

The team is facing many of the same challenges as others who’re working from home — like getting the dog to stay quiet, sharing a space with family members and remembering to step away from the desk from time to time.

Even though they’ve had to step up their game, the Curiosity rover hasn’t missed a beat. They started working from home on 20 March 2020 and two days later, the rover was busy drilling a rock sample at ‘Edinburg’ on Mars.

“We’re usually all in one room, sharing screens, images and data. People are talking in small groups and to each other from across the room,” said Curiosity’s team leader Alicia Allbaugh describing the daily workflow.

Now, they have to monitor around 15 chat channels at a time to stay on top of things. According to Allbaugh, this actually makes things more difficult than they normally would be.

Here’s what it takes to drive the Curiosity rover from home
Even though they have monitors, headsets and other equipment at home — there’s only so much of NASA’s equipment that is retrofitted to work remotely.

For instance, the team behind the rover relies heavily on 3D images and uses special goggles to analyse the data that’s being streamed back to Earth. However, these goggles use advanced graphics cards, which are in sync in the high-performance computers at JPL. Taking them home just wasn’t an option.

Instead, the scientists are now viewing the images on a normal laptop with simple red-blue 3D glasses that you get at any movie theatre. It’s not nearly as effective, but for now, it’s getting the job done.

Aside from problems in having the right hardware on hand, making sure that nothing gets lost in communication as you work remotely is a different challenge altogether. It takes extra effort to make sure that everyone’s on the same page. In addition, it limits the number of commands that you can send out on a daily basis since a lot more time is lost in planning.

The transition from being in a high tech room to trying to operate from what you have available at home has been challenging. Yet, the Mars rover is as productive as ever.

The next time you feel the frustration of ‘work from home’ coming on, remember that if these guys can pull off operating a $2.5 billion piece of machinery — meeting your deadlines, should be a piece of cake.

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