Move over, rover

The room is a strange mix of hi-tech and institutional. One entire wall is taken up by a giant collage of video screens; the others are the usual alumiunium-framed plasterboard. An array of laptops sit open on standard-issue office tables; thinly-cushioned chairs litter the floor, doubtless less comfortable than they look. It’s a long way from the sleek bustle of the Mission Control suites we’re used to seeing on broadcasts of big space missions.

Yet the video wall is showing eerie scenes of an empty, rocky landscape with wheel tracks in the dust, and occasionally the characteristic blocky shadow of a planetary rover appears, topped with the wavering stalk of its sensory array. Graphs and diagrams skitter across the screens, and plots of routes to target locations.

But this isn’t a Mars mission, or even lunar. This is a room at the Satellite Applications Catapult on the Harwell Innovation Campus near Oxford, just over the road from the giant, furutistic silvery doughnut of the Diamond Light Source; it’s the control room for a project called SAFER, a contrived acronym for Sample Field Acquisition with a Rover. And the location on the video wall is remote and hostile, but it’s not extra-terrestrial; in fact, it’s in Chile, near the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal site in the Atacama Desert.