ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst visited ESOC today and had a chance to meet, for the first time since his 2014 Blue Dot mission to the ISS, the ground team from the Opscomm project.
In August 2014, the future exploration of unknown worlds and dangerous areas took a giant leap forward when Meteron, the Multi-purpose, End-to-End Robotic Operations Network was successfully validated in an experiment involving ESA, the Belgian user support and operations Centre (BUSOC) and the ISS.
Alex, on board the ISS, worked with the Opscomm team at ESOC who have been designing ways to control rovers remotely from great distances, even from space. Using a laptop configured by the Opscomm team on the ground, he controlled the car-sized Eurobot rover in ESTEC, Nordwijk, The Netherlands, using an experimental Disruptive Tolerant Network connection.
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst meets the Meteron team at ESOC, his first visit after having remotely operated the Eurobot rover from the ISS in 2014. Credit: ESA
Discussion: no comments