Indian American leads Mars rovers' software team
Monday, 12 January 2004, 20:30 IST
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WASHINGTON: Indian American computer engineer Kanna Rajan led a team of scientists to develop software that enabled America's Spirit rover to land on the red planet. As soon as the Mars Exploration Rovers leave their landers, they will be confronted with completing hundreds of manoeuvres and scientific tasks. The order in which they do these tasks will be decided by computer software developed by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) team led by Rajan. Rajan said the team sometimes worked 16- to 18-hour days on the software that will allow NASA technicians to programme the rovers with each day's set of instructions. Instructions include driving around the planet and scooping up Martian rocks to run experiments on them. "There's a fair amount of risks," Rajan said. "You can damage the arm, you can damage the rover, and that's the end of the mission," he was quoted as saying in the Star-Telegram, a daily published from Texas. Rajan said when the mission gets over he would like to spend more time with his wife and their three-year-old daughter. Rajan is a 1990 University of Texas computer science and engineering master's graduate and now a principal investigator and senior scientist at NASA Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California. Spirit, the first of the rovers, is already on Mars and should be deployed in a few days. When it is, Rajan and a subset of his team will be in the main control room preparing to command the rover with their software, according to the University of Texas, (UTA) Arlington College of Engineering. Rajan, 41, likened the rover's tasks to collecting and placing hundreds of items in a bag. The software examines the items and decides the order and placement of items to achieve the best collection, based on scientific importance, location and time and resources available. Rajan said he and his NASA Ames and Jet Propulsion Laboratory team worked three "very difficult years on this effort, but it's exhilarating to get to this point, ready for surface mission operations, which is really what this mission is about". Their software, called MAPGEN (Mixed-Initiative Activity Plan GENerator), for building activity plans with complex constraints and dependencies will be the first published artificial intelligence-based system to command a rover on another planet. Opportunity, the second rover, is scheduled to arrive on Mars on January 24. Each rover carries five scientific instruments and a grinding tool. The rovers will spend at least three months investigating two sites that may have once hosted liquid water, which scientists consider a prerequisite for life. Rajan says he learned the fundamentals of artificial intelligence -- and concepts he built into the rover's software -- at the University of Texas-Arlington. Spirit has sent back the highest-resolution colour photos ever taken on the surface of the red planet. The 385-pound rover is equipped with a mechanical arm and other tools for experiments.
Source: IANS
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