NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill (CC BY 2.0)
A selfie by NASA's Mars Curiosity rover during a Martian dust storm.
- NASA scientists driving the Mars rover are having to work from home, and have come up with an ingeniously low-tech solution for replacing the advanced 3D goggles they usually use.
- The team is using red-blue 3D glasses, like the ones that used for watching 3D movies.
- They appear to be effective, as the scientists were able to execute a rock drilling operation while working from home.
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NASA scientists working from home are continuing to pilot the Mars Curiosity rover with a little help from a piece of technology that would have been at home in a 1980s movie theatre.
NASA took the decision to send nearly all 17,000 of its staff home on March 18, after multiple staff at its facilities tested positive for the coronavirus, and like the millions of other people now working from home NASA's teams have had to adapt.
In a blog post on Tuesday, NASA detailed how the team driving Curiosity prepared their work-from-home setups, shipping equipment like headsets and monitors from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
Not all the equipment could be sent home, however.
The pilots of Curiosity normally rely on using special 3D goggles to look at the landscape around Curiosity and help the robot navigate and reach out its robotic arm. These goggles automatically flip between left- and right-eye view to create a 3D image.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's Mars Curiosity pilots working from home.
Unfortunately to run these goggles you need an extremely powerful graphics card which can be found on modified gaming computers inside NASA's lab, and which could not be shipped out.
"In order for rover operators to view 3D images on ordinary laptops, they've switched to simple red-blue 3D glasses. Although not as immersive or comfortable as the goggles, they work just as well for planning drives and arm movements," NASA said.
The Curiosity team has been working remotely since March 20, and on March 22 they successfully commanded Curiosity to drill a rock sample.
"It's classic, textbook NASA," science operations team chief Carrie Bridge said in a statement. "We're presented with a problem and we figure out how to make things work. Mars isn't standing still for us; we're still exploring."