At NASA Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, Calif., two K10 rovers navigate a lunar-like landscape. The K10 program is designed to help NASA do more advanced surveys and surveillance of the moon, and for the time being, the robots are being deployed in a series of similar environments across the planet.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For a few minutes Thursday, as I steered one of NASA's K10 intelligent robots across a small field of rocky, sandy terrain, I could almost imagine myself piloting the rover across the surface of Mars or the moon.
Until, that is, I realized I had pretty much no idea what I was doing, and saw that my struggles to steer the rover forward were actually sending it backward. Given that this little robot is worth at least as much as a mid-range Mercedes, I was relieved to see the eagle-eyed scientist standing a few feet away from it as it approached a group of large rocks that could send it sprawling, a switch in his hand capable of stopping it dead in its tracks.
I was spending the afternoon at NASA's Ames Research Center here, talking with Terry Fong, the director of the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG), about the K10 rover program--an initiative designed for remote scouting operations on the moon or Mars. To be sure, the program has been around for a few years, but Fong and his team are constantly tweaking the robots, and so what I got my hands on Thursday (remotely, at least) was a great deal more sophisticated than would have been the case just a few years ago.
We had driven out to Ames' faux lunar/Martian landscape, a 40-meters by 80-meters field of rocks and dirt tucked away in a quiet corner on the western side of the giant NASA facility. I've been to Ames many times, but this was by far the most peaceful part of the grounds I've visited: the shriek of a red-tailed hawk as it soared high overhead was the only real sound besides a gentle wind.
Fong took us into a small shed just outside a small trailer, and sitting inside was K10 "Red," one of the two rovers his team has here. It's called red because it has a big patch of red on its body. Its twin, K10 "Black" was nearby, already prowling around, lost in its own lunar fantasy, different from K10 Red only in that its body is black.
The two rovers (see video below, but be prepared for substantial wind noise) are built to travel at "human walking speed," Fong explained, and can handle between 90 percent to 95 percent of the terrain here. That includes some softball-size rocks, plenty of loose sand and dirt and even a few steep inclines. Fong allowed that some of the bigger rocks, maybe soccer ball-sized, might be a problem, and the steepest part of the incline might cause the rovers to lose traction. But in general, these are sturdy little robots built to withstand some truly out-of-this-world conditions.
According to NASA, the K10 robots are crucial elements of the space program's directive to achieve more complete investigation of the moon than was possible during the Apollo program.
"Human missions to the moon will provide numerous opportunities to advance the scientific exploration of the lunar surface," a NASA brochure about the K10 robots reads. "Initially, human exploration of the moon will be for short periods of time--no more than a few weeks per year. To make use of the time between human missions, robots can be used to perform highly repetitive and long-duration tasks, such as site-mapping and science reconnaissance.
"NASA's K10 robots are designed to be remotely operated on planetary surfaces and act as scouts for human explorers. Scouting is an essential phase of fieldwork, particularly for geology, to help establish priorities and scientific objectives. Robotic scouting can improve human exploration of the moon by providing mission planners with detailed ground-level information to supplement and complement data collected by orbiting satellites."
Imagine, in the future, the Constellation program kicks in and NASA begins sending manned missions to the moon. Fong explained that the K10s would be essential to maximizing the research that could be done in between visits by astronauts. Indeed, they could be left behind after one mission and then be deployed to gather intelligence for the next manned mission, data that could complement what NASA can see with instruments in lunar orbit.
And while the K10s I saw ran off of Lithium-Ion laptop batteries with a life of about four hours, Fong said K10s that stay on the moon could run on an ongoing basis on solar, or on power cells.
Continuous navigation
To look at them, today's K10s are unchanged since their introduction eight years ago. But pop the hood, as it were, and what you find is an ever-changing Red Hat Linux-based brain. Every few months, Fong said, he and his team replace the standard PC laptops that serve as the K10s nerve centers with newer and more powerful ones. Even considering what a top-of-the-line laptop costs, a couple new computers are pretty cheap compared to the tens of thousands of dollars' worth of lidar, navigational equipment, sun trackers--which allow the robots to figure out precisely where they are, an advantage over compasses when they're being used for field tests in far northern parts of the world--3D surveying instruments and more.
Fong said that while much about K10s remains the same today as in the past, one recent innovation has been building in the ability to process data on the go, rather than what was possible in early missions on Mars, where rovers had to stop, calculate, move, stop, calculate, move and so on. That means, he said, that now, K10s can make real-time navigation decisions, progress that means they can cover ground much faster than their predecessors.
A K10 mini, a one-fifth scale robot NASA's intelligent robots group has built.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)All told, explained Fong, a K10 robot is smart enough to figure out a path between point A and point B and determine which parts of the terrain it encounters it needs to skirt due to big rocks or other dangerous conditions.
In some cases, the IRG scientists will test the limits of what the K10 can do. Fong said that during trials last summer at the lunar-like Black Point Lava Flow, in Arizona, he and his team tweaked the K10s' algorithms so that the rovers would push on, despite confronting bush clusters that compute as rocks to be avoided.
"The robot says, 'Hey, it's rocks,' so we make it a lot more aggressive," said Fong.
Five football fields
One reason the K10s are so important to NASA is that they feature 3D laser scanners capable of surveying as much as 500 yards ahead and identifying and analyzing objects as small as pencil erasers. Similarly, the rovers carry downward pointing cameras that take very high-resolution pictures every few feet, images that can then be used to help the mission planners decide where and how to explore in the future.
Back in a lab at Ames, Fong reached into a large suitcase and pulled out what he called a K10 mini (see video below). This is a one-fifth size model rover that is an experiment to see what's possible on a much smaller scale.
The idea behind the mini rover, Fong said, was to try to understand what's possible with a robot that small. And while it's only the size of a small dog, he explained that its basic software was the same as its larger cousins, and was actually built up around the smallest Thinkpad laptop the IRG scientists could find.
And now, the IRG team is looking toward what's next for the K10s. And that, said Fong, is to determine how best to marry the rovers with human teams so that they can be used to support explorers instead of being autonomous. The Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers were built to do everything on their own, the K10s can be employed for wide ranges of tasks that aren't efficient or productive for the folks in space suits. And not only that, but because the K10s can be mounted on the lunar exploration vehicles NASA expects to send its personnel around on the moon in, they can be used for research, surveying and exploration wherever the astronauts go.
But at the same time, NASA knows they have a great deal of utility as autonomous explorers, and on the moon, which is within reasonable striking distance of the Earth, there's even less risk involved than there would be on Mars with putting the K10s through rigorous paces since, even if one got damaged, the next manned lunar mission could come and fix them.
Of course, if you're part of the IRG team, or you're an astronaut trained in operating, or working with, a rover, you probably have a lot of confidence about what the robot's limits are. Why else would anyone trust you with such an expensive toy?
For me, however, clutching that joystick back at Ames, trying to get my K10 to go right, or hop over that little rock, every wrong move seems like potential catastrophe. I think it's going to be a while before anyone lets me play with one of those thing without having a guy watching every move I make with it, ready to push his big red button to keep me from sending it sprawling and costing taxpayers a Mercedes' worth of cash. And I'm OK with that.
A rendering of the MAVEN spacecraft that is being conceived of by a team led by University of Colorado professor Bruce Jakosky. The project aims to study the atmosphere of Mars in order to determine why it changed over the last four billion years, and whether the planet previously was suitable for life.
(Credit: Lockheed Martin)BOULDER, Colo.--As anyone who spent a lot of Saturday mornings watching cartoons knows, Martians are for real, and they're green. But for scientists, things aren't quite as certain. So now, a group is setting out to find out whether the Red Planet could in fact have supported life.
In September, NASA awarded the University of Colorado the biggest research grant in the school's history for a project led by professor Bruce Jakosky to investigate the history of the climate on Mars. The idea behind the $486 million project--known as Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or MAVEN--is to try to discover why Mars' climate has changed over the past few billions years, and whether the planet before those changes was an environment suitable for life.
I visited Jakosky in his office at the University's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) building on Wednesday as part of Road Trip 2009, my annual search for the best stories the country has to offer. And while there, Jakosky explained the rationale for a project that, if successful, could occupy scientists for decades.
Set to launch in November 2013, MAVEN (see video below) is now in what Jakosky said is phase B of a five-phase development cycle. Phase A is concept development; phase B is about determining requirements and preliminary design; phase C is final design and early building; phase D is assembly, testing, and launch operations; and phase E is the science mission.
If the MAVEN team--which is made up of a group from LASP, as well as partners at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of California at Berkeley and Lockheed Martin--passes the major review that comes at the end of phase B, it will move on with its goal of attempting to figure out what led to what Jakosky said are dramatic changes in Mars' atmosphere that have been previously detected by other missions to the fourth rock from the sun.
The highest-level goals for MAVEN are to learn as much as possible about Mars' geology, its interior, its original potential for life and if there was ever life there.
Jakosky explained that past research has demonstrated that Mars used to have a much thicker atmosphere than it does today, and that there likely was water on the planet's surface. Those together indicate an environment that would have been conducive to life. But what is not known is the relationship between the atmosphere, as it has changed, and the potential for supporting living things.
One theory of the MAVEN project is that the disappearance of Mars' magnetic field may have led to the loss of its atmosphere.
(Credit: NASA)The evidence, he said, is that Mars' atmosphere has tremendous amounts of gas to space. The question, however, is what gases, and how much. "So what we'd like to do is observe the escape of gases over (the last) 4 billion years," Jakosky said.
Clearly, there's no way to hit rewind and see precisely what gases there were, and how they escaped. But Jakosky said that by looking at the Martian atmosphere today, and seeing the rate of gas escape today, and why that's happening, the MAVEN scientists can extrapolate back in time, potentially letting them learn what happened over 4 billion years. "We don't know what Mars has done," he said, "but we know what the Sun has done."
And so one of the biggest goals of the project is to measure the ratio of isotopes in the Martian atmosphere, he said, and to see what the loss of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen has been. "Those will tell us about the total loss over time," Jakosky explained.
Eight instruments
The MAVEN project will be comprised of eight major instruments on board the spacecraft to measure the key properties and processes going on today, and it will be the first time such a suite of instruments will have been deployed to Mars.
"It's really a mission of discovery," he said. "We're exploring the upper atmosphere (of Mars) for the first time."
Goddard will produce two of the instruments; LASP two; and UC Berkeley four. The spacecraft will be made by Lockheed Martin in South Denver, Colo.
But while this particular group of instruments will never have been deployed before, the mission itself is "high heritage," Jakosky said, meaning that most of its profile has been done before, in earlier missions. "All we're doing is adding it all together."
Indeed, he said, NASA awarded the MAVEN project, and the nearly half-billion dollars in funding, to Jakosky and his team because their proposal was deemed to have the lowest risk. That was due to the experience everyone on the project had, and because the instruments in question had been deployed on similar projects in the past, he said.
Still, much about how the project is unknown, as is always the case in large-scale initiatives like this, Jakosky said. What is known, however, is that the MAVEN team has a strict top spending limit of $486 million.
But he added that in order to get to the point of having been selected to run the MAVEN project, his and other teams competing for the honor probably spent $60 million or more preparing for the selection process. And that means that his group is battle-tested and ready to move forward, he suggested.
In competitive environments, he explained, teams have to work very hard to make sure every T is crossed and I is dotted. "I see through our mission the benefits of having done that," he said. "We put together the best mission (proposal) we could. Now, we have to implement the full technical capabilities on schedule and on budget."
I asked Jakosky, as the recipient of such a big grant--around $200 million will go to the University of Colorado alone--if he feels that there's much pressure to deliver the goods.
"There is, but I've got such a good team...that I feel very confident," he said. "We've been given (nearly) half a billion dollars of the public's money. So we have to provide the mission and the science back to them. That's a heavy responsibility."
What happened to Mars?
Based on evidence gathered from previous Mars missions, scientists feel confident that the planet once had standing water on the surface. That's because of channels indicating rivers and closed depressions that could have been lakes. But today's Martian atmosphere wouldn't support water on the surface, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it would freeze. So why the change?
Jakosky said that the MAVEN team is exploring the interaction between Mars and the Sun. One question is what role solar winds had in stripping off Mars' atmosphere.
One might conclude that the atmosphere decayed over billions of years, but Jakosky said that the question there is why that happened. Mars is too heavy for molecules from its atmosphere to have simply escaped into outer space, so one of the most important questions MAVEN will seek to find the answer to is what gave those molecules the energy to leave. And based on what they know, solar winds and UV light from the Sun are suspected as two major culprits.
Assuming that MAVEN passes its phase B review, and makes it all the way to launch, the project would have the go-ahead for one year of Martian atmospheric exploration. Much of the analysis of the data would be done in real time as it comes back from the spacecraft, but Jakosky said that based on the results of prior missions like Pioneer Venus, he would expect that scientists would spend 30 years or more analyzing the MAVEN data.
Of course, he hopes that the MAVEN project is such a success that NASA gives the go-ahead for an extension of the mission, likely to a full Martian year, which is just less than two Earth years.
But the first task, he said, is to worry about the work that must get his team from now until launch. And he knows that the path to success is hardly assured. Fully one-third of the nine Mars missions NASA has undertaken have failed, he said. "There are a thousand opportunities to fail between now and a successful mission. Our job is to make sure we don't fall into them, and (to) succeed."
For Jakosky, MAVEN is a chance to add a big exclamation point to his career, particularly because he hasn't been the leader of a mission before. "This is the capstone of my career," he said. "I think this is important enough that I'm willing to spend ten years out of my career doing this mission."
And why should the public be satisfied that the MAVEN team is spending almost a half billion of their dollars?
"We're exploring the solar system (and learning) how planets work," Jakosky said. "These are questions, about life, that everybody asks. Everybody wants to know. Because the public is interested. Because Congress is interested, and because we're answering important questions."
For the next several weeks, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be writing about and photographing the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
On Thursday, NASA announced it has released a set of 3D photo collections of the International Space Station and its Mars rover. The photos were created using Microsoft's Photosynth technology, which automatically stitches together hundreds of images from standard digital cameras.
(Credit: NASA)NASA said on Thursday that it has released a collection of 3D photographs of the International Space Station and its Mars rover.
The photos, which were created using Microsoft's Photosynth tool, show both internal and external views of the space station, as well as a model of the rover.
Because the images were prepared using Photosynth, users can zoom in or out of any of the images, allowing them to see "details of the space station's modules and solar arrays or...a more global view of the complex."
At the same time, the Mars rover images depict the latest iteration of the hardware being crafted at NASA's Mars Science Laboratory. The rover, NASA said, is expected to be launched to Mars in 2011.
Both collections are made up of hundreds of photos taken with standard digital cameras that have been stitched together automatically using Photosynth.
And this isn't the first time NASA has used Photosynth to present images of its various projects. In 2007, it employed the Microsoft Live Labs technology to showcase a 3D view of the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
With Google Earth 5.0, users can now journey to the planet Mars, where they can see 3D views of the Red Planet and dive deep into its canyons.
(Credit: Google/NASA/USGS)While you might never become an astronaut and have the chance to ride a Mars Rover on the Red Planet, Google has now rolled out an Earth-bound alternative for the masses.
With Google Earth 5.0, which was unveiled Monday, users can now explore Mars in the same way they've been able to instantly view 3D images of much of our own home planet for several years in previous versions of the software.
The Mars project, which was implemented in conjunction with NASA, is intended both for casual investigation of our planetary next-door neighbor, as well as serious research. NASA and Google hope scientists and other researchers will use the new Google Earth Mars feature to share data about the fourth rock from the sun.
"The mode enables users to fly virtually through enormous canyons and scale huge mountains on Mars that are much larger than any found on Earth," NASA said in a statement. "Users also can explore the Red Planet through the eyes of the Mars rovers and other Mars missions, providing a unique perspective of the entire planet."
The Mars feature of Google Earth 5.0 lets users see the Red Planet from the perspective of rovers like the NASA Mars Pathfinder Rover.
(Credit: NASA/Google/JPL/University of Arizona)Additionally, the new Mars features allows Google Earth users to view much of the most recent satellite imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as other craft circling the planet. And users are able to add their own generally sharable 3D content to the larger map of Mars.
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NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander has died, running out of power after the Red Planet moved into low light conditions. The lander successfully performed scientific missions for more than five months.
(Credit: NASA)The last Twitter post said it all: "01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000."
For those of you who aren't fluent in binary, the post, from NASA's Twitter account, translates as "triumph."
According to NASA, the space agency is no longer receiving communications from Phoenix, its Mars lander, after more than five months of operation. The not unexpected event came after the lander moved into an area, NASA said in a release Monday, where "seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments."
In other words, Phoenix has run out of gas. But according to NASA, the agency got more out of the lander project than it expected, so it considers--what else would you expect NASA to say at this point--the mission a success.
Click photo for full gallery
And while the lack of suitable sunlight, as well as a dustier sky, led to the inability to power up Phoenix's batteries, NASA does hold out some hope that the lander might return to life at some point.
NASA launched Phoenix on August 4, 2007, and it landed on Mars on May 25, 2008, "farther north than any previous spacecraft to land on the Martian surface."
Among its goals? It "dug, scooped, baked, sniffed, and tasted" Mars' soil. And while that may not seem like glorious duties, NASA credits Phoenix with confirming the presence of water-ice in Mars' subsurface, something that had first been detected remotely by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter in 2002. Phoenix was also a prolific photographer, shooting more than 25,000 pictures of the Red Plant during its tenure there.
NASA said that Phoenix helped further study the question of whether Mars was ever a suitable environment for microbes, and also determined that Mars harbored small deposits of salts that might have been "nutrients for life." In addition, Phoenix discovered calcium carbonate on Mars, "a marker of effects of liquid water."
Throughout the Mars Phoenix mission, NASA had sent out Twitter posts related to the project. Along the way, it gathered 38,417 followers (as of this writing), making the account the seventh most-followed on the service. (Barack Obama holds the top spot.)
And it seems NASA knew that Phoenix was dying. One post prior to its binary goodbye, the account read, "It's very unlikely I'll wake up next spring but if I do I'll call home. Good luck w/ your project."
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