NASA engineer explains how she drives it across Mars

• Insider spoke to Heather Justice, NASA’s Mars driver of drones, who operate the rover remotely.
• The team has launched a successful campaign but drivers still face some challenges.
• Justice pointed out that maintaining a work-life balance was difficult.
• See more stories on the Insider business page.

It’s been about a year since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and like most companies, NASA is still dealing with the ongoing impacts and challenges posed by the crisis. But unlike other companies, the U.S. space agency does just that and is also on a very ambitious mission to Mars.

For engineers and scientists working on the Mars 2020 mission with its Perseverance rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, one of the key challenges is to adapt to new ways of working. This means that some rover drivers have adopted a hybrid work model, for example.

Insider spoke to Heather Justice, a NASA engineer from the Perseverance rover team, about the challenges involved in driving the machine. She also explained how she manages to make orders and discover new scientific discoveries during a pandemic while working at the time of Mars.

Justice has been working at NASA since 2011 and working on the Mars 2020 mission as a rover driver. She was the main driver for the Opportunity rover, which traveled over 45 km and operated on Mars from 2004 to 2018.

Suffering from locks and social speed restrictions, she explained the teams ’modified approach to operating perseverance, launched on July 30, 2020, and working together as a team. “It’s definitely a little bit different from running a modern rover on Mars,” she said.

Under normal circumstances with rovers in the past, the entire team would come to JPL and come together and work together on activity for the first two months. “It’s a group-building experience for all the engineers and scientists working together,” said Justice.

She said: “As rover drivers, we also do our own little thing where we look at the images and say: ‘Okay this part of the land is look steep, or ‘this part looks like there might be some dangers to how we want to drive’. Now, we can’t do that. We can’t all get together near a computer right now so that makes it a little more challenging. “

The perseverance team needs to think about different ways of working, with the impact of the pandemic. The team was used to working in an organized facility full of large rooms, where all the scientists and engineers would gather.

“Instead we only have a few key engineering jobs that need to be collaborated on an in-house lab but spread out across new existing workstations. “Really apart,” said Justice. “We’re a bit like each other from our individual workstations, but it makes it a little easier to work together without putting so much emphasis on the meaningful meetings. “

One particular challenge has arisen as crews cannot move around a computer to consider where the rover is going to drive. Instead, scientists and engineers have to put together all the series that will ultimately guide the rover every day through telephone conferencing systems.

Justice said this is a popular means of communication between the teams, all of which are spread out across workstations due to social distance restrictions. At the same time, remote team members in charge of the navigation camera need to coordinate with the rover drivers in labs to get the images they need of the terrain.

But for Justice, there has certainly been a lot of development and evolution in driving rovers. Some of that has been the focus on the flight systems side, where they tried to make perseverance more capable.

She said: “An example of this is the autonomous navigation where we have made many improvements to the software so that the rover can drive longer on its own. We hope in the long run to it’s easier for us to get longer drivers that allow us to get to the places that science wants us to go. “

Hardware improvements have also been made, where the wheels are different from Curiosity to make them stronger to drive over sharp rocks, “she said.

AP

Preparation for Justice was essential before immersing herself in a Mars mission. “I was very good at making sure that any major work that needed to be done in this time was done in advance,” she said. “I also made sure to fill in food as there is no I know when I can go to the grocery store to buy food if it ‘s in the middle of the night when I try to eat. “

When asked how she managed to balance work and life, Justice indicated that she was sorry. “We work on weekends too, it’s 7 days a week so there was definitely a time when I forgot what day of the week it was.”

“It’s not like you have a standard eight-hour workday and you go home and stop thinking about it,” Justice said.

Then, of course, there’s the added challenge of working on Mars time: “You work and sleep at odd hours and it changes every day – you don’t have a consistent schedule for it- really, “she said.