Still Roving Mars

On my way into work the other day I ran into a colleague from my days working on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER).  At the time I was working MER she was a rover driver - one of the robotics engineers with the coveted job of assembling commands to drive the rover and use the robotic arm.  Turns out she's still on MER and now wearing one of my previous hats on the mission planning team (MPT).  Due to the infectious nature of the project, the excellent team, and the rewarding work, moving around the project to work different roles is not uncommon.  I personally had 4 different roles during my ~four year tenure.

The MPT's primary purpose is to coordinate Ultra high frequency (UHF) communications with Mars-orbiting satellites (MRO, Odyssey, Mars Express) and X-band communications with Earth's Deep Space Network (DSN).  Around 2005 I wrote a series of software tools to automate the team's primary deliverable, the Rover's communications window table.  The code interprets the orbit data (time of overflight, RF predicts, data volume predicts, etc) and rover constraints (time of day, orientation, quantity of passes, data rates, ...) and outputs a table of communication windows to send to the rovers.  These windows used to uplnik the rover's daily set of commands and downlink science and engineering data.

Apparently, they're still using my software 7 years later!  Some intermittent contact with old teammates over the years indicate there have been no major changes to the code.  The significance of this began to sink in after we parted:

• The software has produced well over 10,000 commands that the rovers have executed.
• I built a process that has withstood the test of time and attrition.  I trained about 6 others (with built-in training features) before leaving the project and later they trained fresh meat.  The number of people trained and using the code at any given time between 2005 and 2012 is probably around 20.

I am very proud to have been a part of the MER team and extremely pleased to see that some of my work is still contributing to a successful mission.