To safely drive Curiosity on the Red Planet, NASA employees must use specially repurposed gaming computers with powerful GPUs and wear specially designed goggles. This is so that they can see the images coming from the rover’s camera feed in genuine 3-D. But now that they’re all working from home due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, they don’t have access to all that hardware.
The solution: 3-D glasses like the ones you would get from the movie theater. They’re not as comfortable or high-quality as the special goggles, but it turns out that they’ll get the job done. The team just successfully completed its first mission while working from home, drilling a rock sample. While things at NASA may not be quite as easy from home as they are in the office, the agency says that “Curiosity is as scientifically productive as ever.”
