Place Revisiting and Teleoperation for a Sample-Return Mission Control Architecture

We have been developing a navigational framework called Network of Reusable Paths that enables a rover to revisit any previously driven-to location quickly and cheaply. This place-revisiting capability enables the parallel analysis of scientific data from several sites of interest in planetary exploration missions, which allows for a methodical downselection of the locations to determine the best candidate site for costly scientific operations (e.g., sampling). The results from an analogue mission at the Canadian Space Agency’s Mars Emulation Terrain in Montréal, Canada are presented in which a 220 metre network is built by teleoperating the rover under a five second communication delay. The rover is operated from a remote backroom consisting of science subteams (each assigned to a site) and a rover operations team.