Web-Based Interface for Command and Control of Network Sensors

This software allows for the visualization and control of a network of sensors through a Web browser interface. It is currently being deployed for a network of sensors monitoring Mt. Saint Helen s volcano; however, this innovation is generic enough that it can be deployed for any type of sensor Web. From this interface, the user is able to fully control and monitor the sensor Web. This includes, but is not limited to, sending "test" commands to individual sensors in the network, monitoring for real-world events, and reacting to those event

Distributed Operations Planning

Maestro software provides a secure and distributed mission planning system for long-term missions in general, and the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER) specifically. Maestro, the successor to the Science Activity Planner, has a heavy emphasis on portability and distributed operations, and requires no data replication or expensive hardware, instead relying on a set of services functioning on JPL institutional servers. Maestro works on most current computers with network connections, including laptops. When browsing down-link data from a spacecraft, Maestro functions similarly to being on a Web browser. After authenticating the user, it connects to a database server to query an index of data products. It then contacts a Web server to download and display the actual data products. The software also includes collaboration support based upon a highly reliable messaging system. Modifications made to targets in one instance are quickly and securely transmitted to other instances of Maestro. The back end that has been developed for Maestro could benefit many future missions by reducing the cost of centralized operations system architecture

Rapid Diagnostics of Onboard Sequences

Keeping track of sequences onboard a spacecraft is challenging. When reviewing Event Verification Records (EVRs) of sequence executions on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER), operators often found themselves wondering which version of a named sequence the EVR corresponded to. The lack of this information drastically impacts the operators diagnostic capabilities as well as their situational awareness with respect to the commands the spacecraft has executed, since the EVRs do not provide argument values or explanatory comments. Having this information immediately available can be instrumental in diagnosing critical events and can significantly enhance the overall safety of the spacecraft. This software provides auditing capability that can eliminate that uncertainty while diagnosing critical conditions. Furthermore, the Restful interface provides a simple way for sequencing tools to automatically retrieve binary compiled sequence SCMFs (Space Command Message Files) on demand. It also enables developers to change the underlying database, while maintaining the same interface to the existing applications. The logging capabilities are also beneficial to operators when they are trying to recall how they solved a similar problem many days ago: this software enables automatic recovery of SCMF and RML (Robot Markup Language) sequence files directly from the command EVRs, eliminating the need for people to find and validate the corresponding sequences. To address the lack of auditing capability for sequences onboard a spacecraft during earlier missions, extensive logging support was added on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) sequencing server. This server is responsible for generating all MSL binary SCMFs from RML input sequences. The sequencing server logs every SCMF it generates into a MySQL database, as well as the high-level RML file and dictionary name inputs used to create the SCMF. The SCMF is then indexed by a hash value that is automatically included in all command EVRs by the onboard flight software. Second, both the binary SCMF result and the RML input file can be retrieved simply by specifying the hash to a Restful web interface. This interface enables command line tools as well as large sophisticated programs to download the SCMF and RMLs on-demand from the database, enabling a vast array of tools to be built on top of it. One such command line tool can retrieve and display RML files, or annotate a list of EVRs by interleaving them with the original sequence commands. This software has been integrated with the MSL sequencing pipeline where it will serve sequences useful in diagnostics, debugging, and situational awareness throughout the mission

Browser-Based Application for Telemetry Monitoring of Robotic Assets

AEGSE Virtuoso Charting is an application that enables animated, real-time charting of telemetry streams of data from a rover. These automatically scaled charts are completely interactive, and allow users to choose the variables that they want to monitor. The charts can process data from streams with many variables. This application allows for the simultaneous viewing of up to four individually configured charts on a small touch-screen laptop. The charting application has been tested and found to be extremely robust during long operations. It was left running overnight, with incoming telemetry at 100 Hz, and it did not experience any signs of lost functionality or memory leaks. This robustness is critical for an application that will be used to support vital tests for the Mars Science Laboratory rover. The charting component also provides an interactive interface that allows the engineers to decide how many charts they want on their screen, and which attributes should be plotted on each chart. The application is optimized to make the charts on display take up as much of the available space as possible to maximize the use of the screen real estate. Engineers are also able to plot multiple attributes on the same chart, which enables them to observe the correlation between various attributes

Stage Cylindrical Immersive Display

Panoramic images with a wide field of view intend to provide a better understanding of an environment by placing objects of the environment on one seamless image. However, understanding the sizes and relative positions of the objects in a panorama is not intuitive and prone to errors because the field of view is unnatural to human perception. Scientists are often faced with the difficult task of interpreting the sizes and relative positions of objects in an environment when viewing an image of the environment on computer monitors or prints. A panorama can display an object that appears to be to the right of the viewer when it is, in fact, behind the viewer. This misinterpretation can be very costly, especially when the environment is remote and/or only accessible by unmanned vehicles. A 270 cylindrical display has been developed that surrounds the viewer with carefully calibrated panoramic imagery that correctly engages their natural kinesthetic senses and provides a more accurate awareness of the environment. The cylindrical immersive display offers a more natural window to the environment than a standard cubic CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), and the geometry allows multiple collocated users to simultaneously view data and share important decision-making tasks. A CAVE is an immersive virtual reality environment that allows one or more users to absorb themselves in a virtual environment. A common CAVE setup is a room-sized cube where the cube sides act as projection planes. By nature, all cubic CAVEs face a problem with edge matching at edges and corners of the display. Modern immersive displays have found ways to minimize seams by creating very tight edges, and rely on the user to ignore the seam. One significant deficiency of flat-walled CAVEs is that the sense of orientation and perspective within the scene is broken across adjacent walls. On any single wall, parallel lines properly converge at their vanishing point as they should, and the sense of perspective within the scene contained on only one wall has integrity. Unfortunately, parallel lines that lie on adjacent walls do not necessarily remain parallel. This results in inaccuracies in the scene that can distract the viewer and subtract from the immersive experience of the CAVE

Ensemble Eclipse: A Process for Prefab Development Environment for the Ensemble Project

This software simplifies the process of having to set up an Eclipse IDE programming environment for the members of the cross-NASA center project, Ensemble. It achieves this by assembling all the necessary add-ons and custom tools/preferences. This software is unique in that it allows developers in the Ensemble Project (approximately 20 to 40 at any time) across multiple NASA centers to set up a development environment almost instantly and work on Ensemble software. The software automatically has the source code repositories and other vital information and settings included. The Eclipse IDE is an open-source development framework. The NASA (Ensemble-specific) version of the software includes Ensemble-specific plug-ins as well as settings for the Ensemble project. This software saves developers the time and hassle of setting up a programming environment, making sure that everything is set up in the correct manner for Ensemble development. Existing software (i.e., standard Eclipse) requires an intensive setup process that is both time-consuming and error prone. This software is built once by a single user and tested, allowing other developers to simply download and use the softwar

Spatial Query for Planetary Data

Science investigators need to quickly and effectively assess past observations of specific locations on a planetary surface. This innovation involves a location-based search technology that was adapted and applied to planetary science data to support a spatial query capability for mission operations software. High-performance location-based searching requires the use of spatial data structures for database organization. Spatial data structures are designed to organize datasets based on their coordinates in a way that is optimized for location-based retrieval. The particular spatial data structure that was adapted for planetary data search is the R+ tree

Leveraging Cloud Computing to Improve Storage Durability, Availability, and Cost for MER Maestro

The Maestro for MER (Mars Exploration Rover) software is the premiere operation and activity planning software for the Mars rovers, and it is required to deliver all of the processed image products to scientists on demand. These data span multiple storage arrays sized at 2 TB, and a backup scheme ensures data is not lost. In a catastrophe, these data would currently recover at 20 GB/hour, taking several days for a restoration. A seamless solution provides access to highly durable, highly available, scalable, and cost-effective storage capabilities. This approach also employs a novel technique that enables storage of the majority of data on the cloud and some data locally. This feature is used to store the most recent data locally in order to guarantee utmost reliability in case of an outage or disconnect from the Internet. This also obviates any changes to the software that generates the most recent data set as it still has the same interface to the file system as it did before update

MSLICE Sequencing

MSLICE Sequencing is a graphical tool for writing sequences and integrating them into RML files, as well as for producing SCMF files for uplink. When operated in a testbed environment, it also supports uplinking these SCMF files to the testbed via Chill. This software features a free-form textural sequence editor featuring syntax coloring, automatic content assistance (including command and argument completion proposals), complete with types, value ranges, unites, and descriptions from the command dictionary that appear as they are typed. The sequence editor also has a "field mode" that allows tabbing between arguments and displays type/range/units/description for each argument as it is edited. Color-coded error and warning annotations on problematic tokens are included, as well as indications of problems that are not visible in the current scroll range. "Quick Fix" suggestions are made for resolving problems, and all the features afforded by modern source editors are also included such as copy/cut/paste, undo/redo, and a sophisticated find-and-replace system optionally using regular expressions. The software offers a full XML editor for RML files, which features syntax coloring, content assistance and problem annotations as above. There is a form-based, "detail view" that allows structured editing of command arguments and sequence parameters when preferred. The "project view" shows the user s "workspace" as a tree of "resources" (projects, folders, and files) that can subsequently be opened in editors by double-clicking. Files can be added, deleted, dragged-dropped/copied-pasted between folders or projects, and these operations are undoable and redoable. A "problems view" contains a tabular list of all problems in the current workspace. Double-clicking on any row in the table opens an editor for the appropriate sequence, scrolling to the specific line with the problem, and highlighting the problematic characters. From there, one can invoke "quick fix" as described above to resolve the issue. Once resolved, saving the file causes the problem to be removed from the problem view

Parallel Eclipse Project Checkout

Parallel Eclipse Project Checkout (PEPC) is a program written to leverage parallelism and to automate the checkout process of plug-ins created in Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform). Eclipse plug-ins can be aggregated in a feature project. This innovation digests a feature description (xml file) and automatically checks out all of the plug-ins listed in the feature. This resolves the issue of manually checking out each plug-in required to work on the project. To minimize the amount of time necessary to checkout the plug-ins, this program makes the plug-in checkouts parallel. After parsing the feature, a request to checkout for each plug-in in the feature has been inserted. These requests are handled by a thread pool with a configurable number of threads. By checking out the plug-ins in parallel, the checkout process is streamlined before getting started on the project. For instance, projects that took 30 minutes to checkout now take less than 5 minutes. The effect is especially clear on a Mac, which has a network monitor displaying the bandwidth use. When running the client from a developer s home, the checkout process now saturates the bandwidth in order to get all the plug-ins checked out as fast as possible. For comparison, a checkout process that ranged from 8-200 Kbps from a developer s home is now able to saturate a pipe of 1.3 Mbps, resulting in significantly faster checkouts. Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment) tries to build a project as soon as it is downloaded. As part of another optimization, this innovation programmatically tells Eclipse to stop building while checkouts are happening, which dramatically reduces lock contention and enables plug-ins to continue downloading until all of them finish. Furthermore, the software re-enables automatic building, and forces Eclipse to do a clean build once it finishes checking out all of the plug-ins. This software is fully generic and does not contain any NASA-specific code. It can be applied to any Eclipse-based repository with a similar structure. It also can apply build parameters and preferences automatically at the end of the checkout