Seeing Like a Rover: the Mars Exploration Rover mission

How do scientists work with their robots millions of miles away to make scientific discoveries on a planet they have never set foot on? Drawing on two years of ethnography with the Mars Exploration Rover mission team, I show how science team members learn to "see like a Rover" while working with Spirit and Opportunity. On the one hand, this requires a particular visual fluency with the hundreds of thousands of images that return from the Martian surface, and producing new representations with image processing software to inform each sequence of robot interactions.

 

On the other hand, this visual connection to the Rovers' "eyes" on another planet produces a deeper connection to the robots too: one that ascribes human characteristics to machines, teaches humans to see, move and feel like their robots do, and develops an intimate and embodied understanding of the rovers' experiences on Mars. A snapshot of life on board one of NASA's most famous mission teams, this talk explores the relationship between organizations and teamwork, science and operations, with implications for our understanding of human-computer and human-robot interactions across the solar system.

 

 

Janet Vertesi is assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, where she specializes in the sociology of science, technology, and organizations. She has worked with NASA's robotic space missions as an ethnographer for nine years, including the Mars Exploration Rover mission, the Cassini mission to Saturn, and an upcoming mission to Europa. She is also an active member of the Human-Computer Interaction research community, with publications at ACM CHI, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Ubiquitous Computing, and prior collaborations with Intel and Yahoo. Vertesi holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and M.Phil from University of Cambridge; she is a Fellow of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy and an advisory board member of the Center for Data & Society. She is the author of Seeing Like a Rover: How robots, teams and images craft knowledge of Mars (Chicago, 2015).