100-Year-Old 3D Technology Used To Navigate NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Due To CO.VID-19

The outbreak of CO.VID-19 has been affecting every industry. Almost everyone has to work and take classes online and has so many difficulties, poor wifi connection, lousy computers, kids messing your house during your meeting and so on. But you may feel that it is nothing when you know what NASA staff are going through. Computers at home are absolutely not as powerful as computers at NASA, so they have to use a 100-year-old 3D technology, to pilot the Curiosity Mars Rover.

Piloting the rover from 193 million kilometers away without high-tech equipment is really a challenge. To keep the work going, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s planners in California have to use gaming computers. Curiosity takes 3D images of Mars terrain and sends back to Earth, JPL scientists use powerful GPU gaming computers and special goggles to explore Mars surface and terrain through 3D images. This helps experts make plans for movements and missions of Curiosity more efficiently, helping the rover avoid getting stuck while improving the accuracy when targeting its probes and arms.

However, with the quarantine order, engineers and scientists have to pack up their things at NASA and set up home offices. The problem is that their laptops are not as high-tech as their computers at the office and they cannot access their computer at NASA from home. But with their creativity and resourcefulness, JPL team piloting Curiosity has figured out ways to deal with graphical and processing power at home. They use a technology used in movie theaters in the 1950s.

Although the red and blue cardboard glasses are very crude, they use the same anaglyph technology with 3D goggle glasses, just without electronic shutters. Of course, images seen through those glasses aren't at a high quality like expensive ones but it is enough for engineers and scientists to do their job.

Curiosity successfully drilled a rock sample on Mars, the first mission planned from home 2 days after the team relocated their workplaces.

Working from home causes so many difficulties to the JPL team, it will require more time for conferences and technical manipulations but things can still run smoothly and productively.

>>> NASA Funds A Telescope Built Inside A Crater On The Moon's Dark Side That Will Help Us Look Into 13.8 Billion Years Ago