One can't search for stuff about NASA without coming up with huge amounts of information.
Literally everything is relative to a NASA scientist. Now that we have the technology
to deeply study every aspect of life, the new worlds which NASA deals with and the research they demand consumes ever-growing funds, time, and people. Meanwhile,
U.S. taxpayers have become used to being somewhat clueless about how exactly NASA
is using their money.
Virtual reality, in different forms, is helping to change all this. It is dealing
with the mountains of data in the same way we deal with the actual world: through
visual cortex and motor responses instead of artificial interfaces. By creating
an operational VR environment for rapid data manipulation and searching, the theory and transfer
to the NASA science community and all of its backers is validated. Cost is decreased
tremendously, scientific visualization is enhanced, erroneous information is corrected, all paving the way for frequent future missions.
NASA's recent Pathfinder Mission to Mars has been the first to both use virtual reality
on large scale and present this information, technical and visual, to the public
via the Internet. Suddenly, it seems, NASA's job is more understandable. Virtual
reality helped the mission itself go smoothly, it was used to create beautiful and telling
pictures of Mars, and it made it possible to connect the people of the world to be
a part of an historical moment. Already, new missions are in the works, many of
them depending on virtual reality to make things possible.
The Facts
There are so many mission facts to be found on the Internet: Mars is more than100
million miles away; it's been 21 years since an earthling craft has landed upon Mars;
Sojourner (the tiny, moveable robot located inside of Pathfinder) is a 1-ft.-tall,
2 ft.-long car known as a rover; more than 2000 people "whooped and wept as the pictures
from Pathfinder streamed onto a 25 -ft. screen"; Mars has a typical night temperature
of -125[degrees]F at night. Pathfinder and its tiny robot Sojourner landed and
bounced on the surface of Mars on July 4, 1997.
After the landing, NASA sent the signal for Pathfinder to reveal Sojourner. It was
Sojourner's job to actually move away from the larger craft, take pictures of the
Martian planet, and send them back to NASA. It then took the first picture of the
landscape, which was immediately published on the web. Brian Cooper, the "driver" of Sojourner,
took control of the little car from the Sojourner control console at JPL (Jet Propulsion
Laboratory). The console contained a 24 -in. video monitor, a 3-D mouse and a set of stereoscopic goggles. Sojourner's cameras scanned the terrain and transmitted
this to JPL. There, the images were combined into a three-dimensional landscape.
With the goggles, Cooper was able to assess the virtual landscape. Through this
method, dangers such as chasms and ditches were avoided.
From Pasadena to Mars, the instructions took 11 minutes to be received; from Mars
to Pasadena, the acknowledgment took another 11 minutes to be received. Just in
case of unforeseen problems, Sojourner moves at 1.3 ft. per minute. A point and
an amount of time to get there are given. VR made going so quickly possible!
Simplicity and Cost
The vehicle interface was so easy to use that even a child wouldn't find it difficult.
With this technology, NASA had a chance to do more with less. The on-board computer
in Pathfinder was far less powerful than our typical cyberspace surfers, because
different considerations were made. The microprocessor in Pathfinder's computer began
life as an IBM R6000 that runs at only 20 megahertz. It was able to process about
22 million instructions per second, the RAD 6000, a tougher version from Lockheed
Martin Corporation. Apparently, this could hardly keep up with the average Pentium chip
running at 133 megahertz (processing a maximum 220 million numbers a second). Sojourner
communicates via a 9,600 baud modem -- not even suitable for the World Wide Web --
and uses a 1970 Intel chip able to process about 100,000 instructions a second.
Since 1992, NASA's been in hot water regarding over-spending. The Mars mission, what
with it simplicity, cost $195 million. The average price of a mission in 1990 was
$590 million. By performing such an experiment developing and demonstrating the
use of telepresence and virtual reality systems for controlling rover vehicles at low cost,
future planetary exploration is planned even in dangerous or hostile environments
on Earth. Missions are completed fast and their numbers are increased due to the
decrease in cost and the fact that they are hammered together from available, off-the-shelf
parts.
Correcting Errors
The needs of NASA as a scientific endeavor have been met through virtual reality.
The reason for the Mars mission, and all their other planetary visits, is to collect
true information, to back up or disprove old theories. The capability of detecting
erroneous inputs and requests and recovering from these errors is now available. No
longer do artists' renditions have to suffice.
To exemplify the type of new proof NASA is hoping to discover about Mars with virtual
reality, I'll use the earth. By implementing a VR system, it became apparent that
shallow, large-scale clouds in lower levels were maintained in several clumps off
the western continental boundaries. The VR system showed that these clouds were maintained
because of sea surface temperatures along the western coasts, not because of errors
in the model's topography, as previously thought. Given the temperatures of the
model, the clouds are appropriate, and they move north and south correctly with seasonal
temperature fluctuations. Aqua colored objects represented the clouds in the images
produced, and a yellow/orange surface coloring represents the sea surface temperature. The clouds off the west coast of South America (Chile, etc.) are examples of such
permanent clouds. The Mars mission could find such a system useful in determining
current and previous weather patterns on Mars.
What NASA scientists have received from Sojourner has already been "amazing. It's
the Little Engine That Could." The perception gained from looking at the images
being returned by the connection show what the surface would look like if one was
actually standing there, although there are some slight differences between what the camera
sees and what we see. Only color vividness may be compromised due to dust in the
atmosphere.
Tools
Certain tools have provided additional insight on how to use VR with scientific visualization.
The head display used in "driving" the rover is supported by the BOOM software utility
package (BoomUtil), and Virtual Technology's CyberGlove was supposedly incorporated into the team's VR tools.
"Virtual Reality" glasses were used each day at workstations of the scientists Steve
Solper and Art Thompson who were monitoring the Mars mission. They were answering
students' questions off the Internet in July. David Mittman wrote that the rover
uses stereo information autonomously during hazard avoidance operations in conjunction
with its laser striper. Stereo pairs are used directly by the rover driven to assess
navigation questions. The VR team would then use the stereo pairs to recover the
range info needed for the rendering.
Connecting
The VRML models that litter the Internet allow anyone to view the Mars Pathfinder
lander and rover as never before. 8 MBytes minimum, innumerable sites have been
made available for anyone to become proficient with the NASA lingo and amazed by
the great graphics (check sites in bibliography for examples). Many sites have been created
by NASA as teaching tools for children. They can send in questions to NASA scientists,
and many were answered on a PBS television show called "Passport to Knowledge".
This mission marked the first ever known cultural-exchange program; we sent technology
to a possibly or previously inhabited planet, and we got answers back in the form
of virtual reality pictures. It may not be Quake, but this application of VR has
changed the whole world's perceptions about many things we, as earthlings, have never
gotten a chance to see before.
Bibliography
http://www.pathfinder.com/@@baGZggQAVhdK 1997/dom/970714/space.uncovering_th.html
(TIME magazine, July 14, 1997 VOL.150 NO. 2)
http://www.pathfinder.com/@@baGZggQAVhdK 1997/dom/970707/space.hiting_the_ma.html
(TIME magazine, July 7, 1997 VOL.150 NO. 1)
http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/b ojourner%29%10OR%20%28virtual-reality%29
(NY TIMES, July 4, 1997)
http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/b ojourner%29%10OR%20%28virtual-reality%29
(NY TIMES, August 5, 1997)
http://mars.sgi.com/vrml/vrml.html
http://cnn.com/TECH/9706/pathfinder/mission/
http://sdcd.gsfc.nasa.gov/ESS/annual.reports/ess95contents/sys.vr.html
<<cool pictures>>
http://www.sohar.com/~tso/agent.html
http://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/tasks/deneb/homepage.html
<<cool pictures>>
http://magpie.larc.nasa.gov/vrml/vrml.html
http://www.pgd.hawaii.edu/prpdc/vr/
http://www.ishiilab.dnj.ynu.ac.jp/~Alberto/vr.html
http://www.keo.com/Press_Release_1.html