The science activity planning process for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission was exercised in a ten day terrestrial rover field test in August 2002. A version of the MER mission Science Activity Planner (SAP) tool was used for downlink data visualization and uplink plan generation. The Field Integrated Design and Operations (FIDO) rover was at an undisclosed location in the Arizona desert. Data from the rover was sent via satellite to scientists and engineers at JPL who used SAP to generate uplink sequences.

CLIENT-SERVER PARADIGMS Fernando Pianegiani, David Macii, Paolo Carbone April 2004 Technical Report # DIT-04-049 .

Group collaboration capabilities have been developed for Internet-based Mars rover mission operations. Internet-based operations enables scientists to participate in daily Mars rover mission operations from their home institutions. Group collaboration enables geographically separated users to collaboratively analyze downlinked data and plan new activities for the rover. The motivation for group collaboration in Mars rover mission operations and the technologies developed to provide group collaboration are discussed. The group collaboration capability was developed for use in rover mission operations in the 2003 NASA Mars Exploration Rover mission.

Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission was exercised in a ten day terrestrial rover field test in August 2002. A version of the MER mission Science Activity Planner (SAP) tool was used for downlink data visualization and uplink plan gener-ation. The Field Integrated Design and Operations (FIDO) rover was at an undisclosed location in the Arizona desert. Data from the rover was sent via satellite to scientists and en-

A variety of designs for Mars rover and lander science operations centers are discussed in this paper, beginning with a brief description of the Pathfinder science operations facility and its strengths and limitations. Particular attention is then paid to lessons learned in the design and use of operations facilities for a series of mission-like field tests of the FIDO prototype Mars rover. These lessons are then applied to a proposed science operations facilities design for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. Issues discussed include equipment selection, facilities layout, collaborative interfaces, scalability, and dual-purpose environments. The paper concludes with a discussion of advanced concepts for future mission operations centers, including collaborative immersive interfaces and distributed operations. This paper's intended audience includes operations facility and situation room designers and the users of these environments.

Downlink data products in Mars rover missions need to be associated with their uplink commanded target locations and the uplink commands that produced them. A system for automatically associating downlink data products with uplink commands and targets has been developed and used in a terrestrial rover field test. HTML reports viewable in a browser are automatically generated to relate downlink data products with the uplink sequence elements that produced them. The approach assumes that there is only one sequence thread being executed on the rover. This assumption is not true for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover mission, so the approach cannot be used directly in the MER mission. TABLE OF CONTENTS The NASA 2003 Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission will land two rovers on Mars in early 2004. Scientists and engineers will command each rover on a daily basis which will require a very efficient Earth-based ground operations system to generate the daily uplink commands. An important part of the ground operations system is analysis of science data that has been downlinked from Mars. Two basic questions that a scientist needs answered for each data product are "Where was this data acquired?" and "What command caused this data to be acquired?" This information is critical to enable a scientist to analyze data. Providing this information efficiently enables scientific decisions to be made quickly enough to impact the daily uplink command sequence generation. The daily rover command sequence generation process starts with the receipt of the downlink data from Mars. Engineering and science data are processed, placed in databases, and analyzed. An engineering team determines the status of the rover. Scientists evaluate scientific data and determine what activities they want ...

Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission was exercised in a ten day terrestrial rover field test in August 2002. A version of the MER mission Science Activity Planner (SAP) tool was used for downlink data visualization and uplink plan generation. The Field Integrated Design and Operations (FIDO) rover was at an undisclosed location in the Arizona desert. Data from the rover was sent via satellite to scientists and engineers

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for monitoring and controlling mobile robots are presented in this report. These interfaces are used to display the robot sensory information and other related data to the user, while allowing the user to control the robot. The main features of the interfaces are described, a number of examples from related work are presented, and a set of guidelines for the design of interfaces are proposed. The guidelines cover sensor views in the GUIs and aspects of user control of the robot using the GUIs.