The Web Interface for Telescience (WITS) is an Internet-based tool that enables members of geographically distributed science teams to participate in daily planetary lander and rover mission planning. WITS enables the viewing of downlinked images and results in various ways, terrain-feature measurement and annotation, and the planning of daily mission activities. WITS is written in the Java language and is accessible by mission scientists and the general public via a Web browser. The public can use WITS to plan and simulate their own rover missions. WITS was used during the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission primarily for public outreach and was evaluated as a science operations tool at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). WITS will be used as an operations tool in the 1998 lander mission, which will land on Mars in December 1999, and in the 2001 and 2003 lander-rover missions to Mars.

The new task lines and motion guides approaches to telerobotics are described. Motion guides is a new paradigm for teleoperation of a robot where the path is teleoperated rather than the robot, and the robot is constrained to follow the path. Continuous commands to the robot are only onedimensional: forward, back, or halt along the motion guide. Task lines have subtasks attached to motion guides. The task lines and motion guides have been implemented in a virtual reality environment to enable task description and execution in a natural, virtual reality graphics environment rather than via direct interaction with a command program. Subtasks are represented in the virtual reality environment by icons attached to the motion guides. The combination of task lines and motion guides is valuable for ground control of Space Station robots, which is the initial application for this technology.