NASA team is controlling the Mars Curiosity rover from home — take a look at their work from home setups

The coronavirus pandemic has laboured millions of Americans to work from home over the past month, and likely into the foreseeable future.  

Understandably, draw up remotely is easier for some employees than others, as coordinating with colleagues sprawled across the map can prove to be a awkward test of patience and technology. But what do you do when your most prominent team member is on a distant planet, millions of miles away?

That’s the defy facing the team of NASA scientists and engineers who are responsible for the Curiosity rover that’s currently exploring the surface of Impairs, roughly 140 million miles from earth.

The Curiosity team, which typically works from NASA’s Jet Propelling Laboratory in Southern California, has been working remotely since California officials issued a “stay at home” codification for all non-essential workers to help stop the spread of coronavirus in March, the space agency said in a blog post this week.

That means the Curiosity team has been artificial to adapt to an extraordinary situation in which they have to manage the work of hundreds of people who maintain and control the gadabout from millions of miles away.

That includes writing computer code to program the rover’s actions, series by sequence, while conducting experiments with materials the Curiosity rover collects on its travels across the Red Planet.

“We’re customarily all in one room, sharing screens, images and data. People are talking in small groups and to each other from across the chamber,” Alicia Allbaugh, who leads the Curiosity team, said in the post.

Now, those workers often have to hold several video conference calls at once, while also heed in touch over messaging apps, in order to complete the same tasks they would normally pull off in their parceled office space.

Sometimes, the team needs more than 20 people at a time working to program a arrangement of actions before sending those instructions to the rover (a process that can take days) before it can complete a duty like drilling into a rock for a sample of Martian sandstone to analyze.

NASA had to equip the workers with headsets, praepostors and other computer equipment to make sure their work-from-home setups were adequate.

They also had to survive punishment home simple 3D glasses that allow them to view 3D images sent back from Mars by the vagrant on their home laptops (as opposed to special goggles they normally wear in the lab, but were not able to take lodgings), NASA says.

Carrie Tie, who heads up science operations for the Curiosity team, says she can still mostly stick to her normal routine, though she requires more virtual technology to do so now. 

“I probably monitor about 15 chat channels at all times,” she said. “You’re juggling myriad than you normally would.”

But, that’s perfectly the sort of adaptability that comes with the job, she adds.

“It’s classic, textbook NASA,” she said. “We’re presented with a hard and we figure out how to make things work. Mars isn’t standing still for us; we’re still exploring.”

Of course, even with cause get revenges of businesses being forced to adapt to more flexible working arrangements amid the coronavirus pandemic, not everyone is proficient to work remotely, whether that be because of their specific job requirements or, in some cases, lack of access to high-speed internet at digs. A 2017 Gallup survey found that only about 43% of U.S. employees work remotely with some frequency, albeit some experts believe that number could rise permanently after so many people are regularly incorporate from home amid for weeks at a time during the coronavirus pandemic.

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