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Marketing and University Communication UW-Green Bay, CL 815 2420 Nicolet Drive Green Bay, WI 54311-7001 (920) 465-2626 E-mail: hildebrs@uwgb.edu Last update: 2/29/08 |
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In
the News Archive - Year:
February 23, 2008 Women run Mars vehicle UWGB professor guides camera as part of all-female team By Paul Srubas
A team of all women, including Green Bay's Aileen Yingst, was entirely in the driver's seat of the NASA Rover Spirit as it roamed Mars' surface on its mission of exploration.
"The Mars Rover program itself is a technical achievement, a scientific achievement, but this was more of a social achievement — one giant step for womankind," said Yingst, a professor of natural and applied sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
A planetary geologist, Yingst also is director of the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium based at UW-Green Bay and is under contract with NASA for its Mars mission. She's involved in a project of geologic research with the mission, but she also is trained to be a member of the 20-person teams required to actually operate each of the two Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.
The operating teams drive the Rovers remotely with computers; not only do the operators get to remain on Earth, they don't even have to leave their hometowns. Yingst works out of her office at UW-Green Bay.
She's been doing it for about the last two years. What was different about Friday was that the operating team was made up entirely of women.
"This is how far we've come," Yingst said. "Thirty years ago — in my lifetime — women could be moms, teachers, secretaries or nurses. That was it. Now there are enough women scientists and engineers that we can field an entire team with women to operate the Rover."
Operating a Rover via a desktop computer sounds like a gamer's paradise, but it isn't that way. It isn't like working a simulator as you "drive" the Rover and watch real-time images of Mars' surface roll past on your computer monitor.
If that's what it involved, Yingst admitted, she'd probably not be any good at it.
"I have a horrible sense of directions — I know my limitations," she said.
It takes 20 people to run one Rover because the Rovers have a variety of equipment — not just for stopping, going and turning but for detecting and reacting to possible hazards, such as deep craters or cliff edges, and for such things as taking pictures, sampling rocks, transmitting and receiving information — all of which require computer commands from 35 million miles away. Most of each of the functions requires its own operator, and Yingst's job on Friday was to operate a camera on the end of a mechanical arm aboard the Spirit. The arm also holds two pieces of equipment that help identify rocks. Each of those pieces has its own operator, and a fourth person is in charge of operating the mechanical arm.
Part of the complexity is coordinating the tasks and functions of each of those pieces of equipment, along with the tasks and functions of the entire Rover. Yingst's work on Friday involved intermittently communicating by phone with other team members and typing strings of code into a computer.
To complicate matters, it takes about 20 minutes for dispatched computer messages to travel through space to get to the Rover, and most of the information the Rover collects won't be available for analysis for a couple days, which means Yingst won't know until Monday whether the 20 or 30 photographs that she directed Spirit to take will be of any use.
It's a tough job, one for which "you really do have to be a rocket scientist," Yingst said. But she enjoys the job of helping to operate the Rover as much as she enjoys the scientific part of the job — analyzing the data that the Rover collects and helping other scientists use that information to search for clues into the origins of Mars and possibly into the origins of life.
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