Sunday, August 25, 2013

Curiosity in 3D in KeckCAVES!

This video is in 3D, filmed using KeckCAVES software with a JPL CAD model of Curiosity




This is super cool, but my real dream is to have an animated Curiosity (e.g. turning wheels, pointing cameras, moving arm, etc.) to walk around with through Gale Crater and up the slopes of Mt. Sharp on real HiRISE and MastCam data!  It's close to possible - we just need a really good computer science graduate student and some $$ to pay them!

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Curiosity Update - On our way to Mt. Sharp with a bit of mudstone

It's been a while since I've posted anything.  It was a crazy-busy spring from me trying to teach as well as keep up with my work for the Mars Science Laboratory.  Now that we are halfway through summer, I'm feeling caught up.  I have time to focus on writing and editing papers, for MSL, my graduate students' projects, and our big Antarctic project.  It has been wonderful.

Here is a nice update from Colette, a great engineer I often work closely with:



Colette mentions that the science team will be releasing our results in the future.  I spent this morning editing our first paper on SAM results from the Yellowknife Bay mudstones.  The lead author is Doug Ming, and he plans to submit it to Science early next week.  It is so thrilling to see the plans for analyses turn into data and then interpretations.  Writing up the results forces us to critically evaluate what we've done and what the data mean.  It is satisfying to see how much we've learned!

Next Tuesday, I go back on shift as a Long Term Planner for almost 2 weeks.  During that time, we'll be driving, planning our next suite of science observations, and managing the data in our cameras.  It will be a busy two weeks.