Day One of the Pooh's Corner EVA

Today was a big day. Our first EVA was on the plan. Everything had to be working, and to make it more exciting we had never done an autonomous robot EVA. Today's plan was to send Boudreaux over the previously planned path to Pooh's Corner. (see ECSR from 04/15) and takes some panoramas. After we looked at the available aerial image of the area around the hab that includes Pooh's Corner, we decided that we would drive Boudreaux to Pooh's Corner and take four panorama images of the Pooh's Corner area. Figure 1 shows the discussion mapped in the Compendium tool.

Figure 1. Morning Briefing for Day One Pooh's Corner EVA
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The actual EVA plan was also created in our Compendium meeting capture tool (see Figure 2). After the plan was created in Compendium, Boudreaux started the EVA.

Figure 2. Boudreaux's plan for Pooh's Corner EVA
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The Mobile Agents system was started, the plan was read in by the HabCom agent and distributed to the ERA Personal Agent. Boudreaux, the ERA robot, took about 5 hours to execute the plan autonomously. It eventually arrived at Pooh's Corner, all the while the crew monitoring the EVA via Boudreaux's video cameras.

Figure 3. Kim Tyree from JSC monitoring Boudreaux's traversal
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Excitement was highest when Boudreaux took its first panorama at WayPoint10 at the entrance of Pooh's Corner. It took about 12 minutes to take the panorama and stitch it together into one Jpeg image (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Boudreaux's first panorama at entrance of Pooh's Corner
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When the picture came back to the hab it was stored into ScienceOrganizer in the hab and then copied to Earth. E-mail was automatically sent to the remote science team. Figure 5 shows a screenshot of the panorama in ScienceOrganizer.

Figure 5. Panorama stored in ScienceOrganizer
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Boudreaux came home after driving more than 1000 meters. The ERA team joked that it took the MER rovers more than three months to accomplish that. All in all a successful EVA, even though we did not receive all four panoramas on the plan.

While Boudreaux was driving back to the habitat, the crew analyzed the panoramas and discussed a plan for tomorrow's astronaut EVA to Pooh's corner. Figure 6 shows the Compendium map of that preliminary planning discussion. This is send to the RST with a video replay tool. Tomorrow morning we hope to see the RST's comments on the plan.

Figure 6. Crew's EVA analysis and next day EVA planning
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