Desert RATS crew member heads for Space Exploration Rover on the Black Point Lava Flow Photo Credit/NASA Desert RATS
NASA’s Desert RATS is nearing the half-way point of its 15-day, 2010 field exercises on the Black Point Lava Flow in Northern Arizona.
It’s been nearly 24/7 for the 100 engineers and scientists involved in the high tech demonstration of rovers, habitats and robotic equipment under development by NASA and others for future human missions to the moon, Near Earth Asteroids, Mars and other deep space destinations.
The 13th annual Desert RATS, short for Research and Technology Studies, began on Aug. 31.
This year’s participants remain mindful that the success of their efforts depends on future generations of engineers and scientists, the young men and women now in school who chose to pursue studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or what educators call the STEM fields.
This year, the Coalition for Space Exploration has joined with the Challenger Centers for Space Science Education to offer the public a unique opportunity to follow along as the Desert RATS team puts a pair of habitable Space Exploration Rovers, a portable habitat, space suits, tools and the other high tech gear that will be needed for exciting voyages to distance destinations.
During the first week, the Desert RATS hosted a webcast that featured explanations of the activities from several of the major participants. as well as answers to questions posed by students and the public over Face Book.
Listen to last week’s archived 30-minute webcast here .
Here’s another link to the NASA’s Desert RATS website, with its additional links to Face Book, Twitter and the other social media through which the science, engineering team is communicating with the public about its activities at the remote lava flow.
This year’s exercise has engineers and scientists working with extraordinary closeness on the design of equipment like the Space Exploration Rover,
“Rather than we as engineers going off and designing what we think is a great rover and then showing it to (the scientists) right before we fly, we’ve involved the scientists from the outset so they can tells us what they need the vehicle to do,” said Adam Abercromby, NASA’s deputy project manager for the solar powered SEVs. “They are helping us design a vehicle that is optimized for science.”
An astronaut and geologist is assigned to live and work aboard each rover for seven days. At the mid-point of the exercise, the rovers will dock with a portable Habitat Demonstration Unit. This year, the HDU, is functioning as more of a geology laboratory, medical station and repair shop for space suits and hand tools than a permanent habitat. Each rover is assigned a fresh astronaut/geologist crew before it departs for a final seven days of field testing.
“From the science perspective we’re really interested in how dual rover operations go,” said Jake Bleacher, one of the geology team members and a scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We are testing several different communications scenarios using the rovers. Do they go together? Do they separate and go in different directions? How does that allow us to do the science on another planet?”
“When we go to any planetary surface, we are going to do field geology, that is the prime science driver,” said Jim Rice, a second rover geology from Goddard. “We are the people who can make the expert calls on the geology there, based on our traverse plans. If we need to make any changes, we are on the ground. Our experience in doing field work becomes of value there.”