[ Page 3 ]An out-of-this-world IT job: Mars rover driver

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In the past several weeks, the rover Opportunity has been sent into Victoria Crater, giving scientists more detailed views of the surface.

Driving into such craters is "fun, but they're actually dangerous," Maxwell said, because steep slopes make it risky for the rovers to make their way through the terrain. "You can't hit a button and stop it" if something goes wrong," he said. "If something does go wrong, we're not going to know until the next day."

Rover drivers are aided by the simulator, but they also must rely on their imaginations and experience to safely traverse the terrain, he said. "You have to make sure that the series of commands that you're sending to the rover can detect if something goes wrong and recover appropriately."

The commands are sent in text that the rovers can understand and interpret. "You can try and think of it as a sort of Pidgeon English," a simplified language with some numbers and measurements thrown into guide the rovers, he said.

When the rovers first began exploring Mars after landing in January 2004, it took the rover drivers nearly 19 hours to compile the commands for the next day's activities, Maxwell said. Now the driver teams can do the work in eight to 10 hours. "It's a good, full work day," he said.

"I get up and I go to work and I drive a rover around on another planet," he said. "It's the greatest job on two planets."

The six-wheeled rovers were designed to explore the planet for 90 days, but almost four years later, they are still working and collecting data. There have been software upgrades, hardware failures and other problems, but the missions continue.

The rover Spirit has a right front wheel that no longer can rotate on its axle and has to be driven around gingerly as it drags its broken wheel, Maxwell said.

"It's like driving a broken grocery cart by remote control from 100 million miles away," he said. "So it has its challenges."