When science and engineering teams navigate two rovers across the rocky Martian terrain, the daily science planning process is intense, with more than 100 people collaborating to work each rover.

Good communication is essential. The efficiency with which the teams are able to access and share information will directly impact the amount of science data returned, and the success of the science-driven Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Mission.

A tool developed specifically to assist science and operations teams during MER surface operations planning is MERBoard, a product of Ames' MER Human Centered Computing (HCC) project and a new class of computing platform—the collaborative computer.

A combination of software and five-foot touchscreen, MERBoard's large interactive work surface facilitates collaboration among planning teams that can gather around the board to retrieve, view, share, and annotate mission data and rover images. The board provides an immersive work environment while its touchscreen literally puts information at the team members' fingertips, enabling a user to drag and drop data to a personal or group icon.

Any data on the screen can be captured and annotated on the MERBoard's whiteboard, and content can be created on the whiteboard. One MERBoard can view what's happening on another, enabling collaboration from one board to another. A personal computer can be displayed or controlled from a MERBoard at the touch of a button, and data is easily transferable to and from the MERBoard and personal computers.

"It allows us to do planning for the mission in a very efficient way," says Andy Knoll, a Harvard professor and MER mission science team lead. "First, we can create things that are visually clear. Second, we can save these and email to people or have them called up later or bring them up in another room." MERBoard is a mission enhancement that works with the mission's critical path tools provided by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is managing the MER mission.

MERBoard was a product of a unique proposal by Ames to JPL in 2000 that didn't pitch technologies or tools but a process for making observations and a promise to deliver recommendations for technology and procedures that would enhance mission productivity.

During the next two years the MER HCC project's researchers interviewed and observed JPL current and previous mission staff and conducted observations during two rover exploration field tests performed in an Earth desert.

The field tests gave scientists and operations staff at JPL and at remote locations all over the world opportunities to operate a rover in a setting similar to the harsh Martian environment. The teams worked as if part of a real Mars mission, collaborating to come up with sequence plans based on rover images, sensor data and instrument data.

Meanwhile, the field training gave the MER HCC program a chance to observe the teams in action, critical to coming up with useful recommendations, said MER HCC program lead Jay Trimble. "People cannot consciously describe their total work experience. We saw where existing work tools and practice could be augmented to help productivity among scientists and engineers."

During the 2001 field test, surface operations teams at JPL gathered around flip charts and laptops to create, share, and view information. The groups collaborated around the information display even though the information was difficult to see from just a few feet away. The charts would sometimes get lost. Information on the pages could not be archived for multiple users' reference.

"They were using flip charts for things like brainstorming, laying out scientific hypotheses, developing long-term strategic plans for the rover... With the MERBoard, we preserved that informal mode of expression you get on a flip chart or a whiteboard but added the ability to use multiple pages and share them, remote control and view them, and we added the ability to save and recall them at any time during the mission."

The informal mode of MERBoard enables the user to focus on the complexity of the task, not the tool. Fifteen MERBoards are distributed throughout JPL for surface operations.

The MERBoard is being extended to the Xboard architecture, a development platform for NASA. It has a plug-in architecture that allows NASA developers to add capabilities to fit any NASA environment. The technology is Java based and runs on all industry standard operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS-X.