Wireless Sensor Networks for Mars

The initial three years of my PhD were funded through a NASA Graduate Student Research Program fellowship. One of the benefits of this program was that they encouraged students to come out during the summers to learn more about the problems that NASA faces. I spent my 1999 and 2000 summers in Pasadena, working in the Center for Integrated Space Microsystems. While I initially had plans to evaluate how well my GRIM software worked with one of their clusters, my center director asked if I'd be interested in trying something a little different. He told me that the recent success with the Sojourner rover had sparked a great deal of interest in deploying more in situ sensors on Mars. He challenged me to think about engineering problems NASA would face if it were to cast hundreds to thousands of wireless sensor nodes across Mars.

It was very different than the PhD topic I had been studying, but it was too interesting to pass up. I dove into the papers to learn what people had been doing with wireless sensor networks on Earth. As a networking person, the part that interested me the most was figuring out how a collection of low power, low performance sensor nodes would boot up, establish a routable network, and then collect meaningful information over a geographic region. There were many examples to draw from on Earth, including battlefield sensors, buoy networks, and arctic tumbleweed sensors. My director introduced me to people from all over the lab to learn more about how NASA builds resilient embedded systems that are designed to survive being dropped out of the atmosphere into an environment with harsh thermal constraints.

While the NASA summers took me off course into a side topic that delayed my graduation, it was one of the best things I did during my academic career because it encouraged me to think about hard problems that were outside of my comfort zone. I wrote up the below technical report summarizing some of the things I learned, though I never got it officially entered for a report number at JPL or Georgia Tech. I put the paper up on my school web page, which would up getting referenced more than I would have thought.

Publications

• Summer Report Craig Ulmer, Sudhakar Yalamanchili, and Leon Alkalai "Wireless Distributed Sensor Networks for In-situ Exploration of Mars". NASA JPL Summer Internship Report.