The Verification & Validation of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Surface Mission Operations System

Leading up to its landing on Mars on February 18, 2021, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover Surface Mission Operations System (MOS) underwent a verification and validation (V&V) campaign consisting of a series of Super Thread Tests and Operational Readiness Tests. This V&V campaign emphasized incremental testing, mission scenario and capability coverage, and the Test-As-You-Fly approach wherever possible. Although the elements that comprise the Surface System underwent their own internal V&V campaigns, the system-level tests were vital in uncovering findings observable only through the integrated and flight-like nature of these Surface Mission Operations System V & V tests. The COVID-19 pandemic posed additional challenges, including limited facility access, constrained in-person activities, changes to operations paradigms, and evolving safety protocols in the midst of the testing campaign and preparation for surface operations. This paper describes the Verification and Validation campaign of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Surface Mission Operations System that led to the readiness for rover operations on Mars. © 2023 IEEE.

Can Anybody Help Me?: Using Community Help Desk Call Records to Examine the Impact of Digital Divides During a Global Pandemic

The COVID-19 global pandemic has ignited lightning-fast adoption of digital tools in our communities, organizations, and systems of governance. It also inspired an unprecedented level of providing access to digital devices to communities and individuals lacking prior access. The situation and circumstances provide a unique opportunity to understand digital divides through a new lens. In this work, we contribute a contemporaneous understanding of digital divides beyond access by qualitatively analyzing over 300 calls made to a volunteer-based community IT help desk. We highlight the intertwined network of challenges leading to ecosystem digital divides and contribute new insights into how the complex socio-technical systems of practice, and the tools to support them, must adapt to bridge digital divides more effectively. © 2022 ACM.

Supreme Court v. Necropolitics: The Chaotic Judicialization of COVID-19 in Brazil

Worldwide, governments have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic with emergency orders and policies restricting rights to movement, assembly, and education that have impacted daily lives and livelihoods in profound ways. But some leaders, such as President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, have resisted taking such steps, denying the seriousness of the pandemic and sabotaging local control measures, thereby compromising population health. Facing one of the world's highest rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths, multiple political actors in Brazil have resorted to judicialization to advance the right to health and other protections in the country. Responding to this litigation has provided the country's Supreme Court an opportunity to assertively confront and counter the executive's necropolitics. In this article, we probe the malleable form and the constitutional basis of the Supreme Court's decisions, assessing their impact on the separation of powers, on the protection of human rights (for example, on those of prisoners, indigenous peoples, and essential workers), and relative to the implementation of evidence-based interventions (for example, lockdowns and vaccination). While the court's actions open up a distinct legal-political field (sometimes called "supremocracy")-oscillating between progressive imperatives, neoliberal valuations, and conservative decisions-the capacity of the judiciary to significantly address systemic violence and to robustly advance human rights remains to be seen.