Scott Maxwell, veteran rover driver who is also a UMSF member, has a great article concerning him today on CNN: His Other Car Is On Mars.

Go, Scott! Go MSL!!!

We've been very lucky to have a lot of the mission people frequent the Forum.
Some are extremely giving with their input and a whole bunch just lurk.

I find it amazing that people such as Paolo and Rob have time at all, given the pace of their day jobs.

Thanks to ALL of you for being here and sharing your knowledge with us.

Click to view attachment

Another fun article on the people behind the mission: http://www.npr.org/2012/08/03/157597270/cr...tw&cc=share

The MSL Rover Planner team:

Click to view attachment

Back Row, Left to Right: Matt Heverly (M), John Wright (M), Jeff Biesiadecki(M), Chris Leger (A), Matt Robinson(A), Avi Okon(T), Scott Mccloskey(T), Scott Maxwell(M), Paolo Bellutta(M), Brian Cooper(M)
Front Row, Left to Right: Frank Hartman(A), Vandana Verma(A), Joseph Carsten(A), Mark Maimone(M), Chris Roumeliotis(T), Jeng Yen(A)

(M) = Mobility RP
(A) = Arm RP
(T) = Turret RP

One of my favorite moments of 'public outreach' occurred on "Car Talk" - the NPR show. Somebody called in describing a stuck wheel; Click and Clack both thought the "car" should be junked.

"How much is it worth?"

"About $450 million"

It was one of the rover drivers calling in about Spirit's stuck wheel!

I actually got quite emotional reading that, it captures Scott *perfectly*. Brilliant piece about an amazing guy.

I have to say hats off to the NASA/JPL media\PR team on the way they have created an interest in the people as well as the mission, the articles about Adam Steltzner, this one about Scott and others have really brought the mission alive in a way that I've never seen before.

That was John Wright. On Earth he drives a 'vette.

Paolo

This gigapan shows who's who at their stations for EDL in Mission Control....

It's not really a Gigapan ... but it seemed the right place to host it and tag people in it ... I took that

Yeah, I was wondering how you got everyone to stand still enough for gigapanning! ;-)

I had 2 minutes during the last ORT

Where is this photo from? Is it a NASA/JPL photo?

My camera. One of the drivers was not present that day and had to be photoshopped in.

Paolo

Ha! Was wondering about that.

We did a study, we modeled each rover driver with a mixture of gaussians, ran a few thousands Monte Carlo simulations on one of the computer clusters at JPL to compute the maximum likelyhood of having all rover planners in a space interval less than 5 meters and a time interval less than 10 minutes. The result of the simulations came out to be Aug 1st, 2012 2pm PDT at the JPL Mall. We got a 93.75% clustering, not bad.

Paolo

Darn good job. If I had to guess I'd say Matt Heverly.

Nahh - Chris Leger

You know you're a geek when you think this is as funny as I think it is