Word: cooper
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...People picture this as being like a radio-controlled car, which would be the way to go if we could do that," says Brian Cooper, who will be the one sending the commands that tell the rover where to go. "But with an 11-minute time delay, it doesn't work that...
What fascinates this global audience is not so much the nature of the vehicle; at just 1 ft. tall and 2 ft. long, the boxy, six-wheeled, 22-lb. car is nobody's idea of a roadster. But while Cooper will be at the controls at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the car will be 119 million miles away, touring the arid Ares Vallis floodplain on Mars...
...camera on the lander will snap a picture of both the car and the landscape, and by 6 p.m. on the West Coast, NASA hopes to release the image both to the press and on the Web mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/) After that, it will at last be time for Brian Cooper to take the wheel...
...with a 24-in. video monitor, a 3-D mouse and a set of stereoscopic goggles. Before the rover leaves the lander, its camera will scan the terrain and transmit what it sees to J.P.L., where software will combine the images into a three-dimensional vista. Donning the goggles, Cooper and other scientists will then scout the virtual riverbed. When they find a likely place for Sojourner to visit, they'll start up the car and, using the mouse, tell it where...
...going will be slow. Commands from Cooper's computer will take 11 minutes to travel from Pasadena to Mars; it will take another 11 minutes for the rover to acknowledge that it has received the instruction. To prevent Sojourner from blundering into a chasm or over a cliff, engineers designed it to move no faster than 1.3 ft. per minute. Onboard gyroscopes and lasers will help it feel for dangers the camera might have missed. If Sojourner spots an obstacle, it will try to avoid it or simply stop. "We'll give it a point...