NASA Rover Prototype Set to Explore Greenland Ice Sheet

This is a big step forward! Congratulations!

 NASA's newest scientific rover is set for testing May 3 through June 8 in the highest part of Greenland.

The robot known as GROVER, which stands for both Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research, will roam the frigid landscape collecting measurements to help scientists better understand changes in the massive ice sheet.
This autonomous, solar-powered robot carries a ground-penetrating radar to study how snow accumulates, adding layer upon layer to the ice sheet over time.

Greenland's surface layer vaulted into the news in summer 2012 when higher than normal temperatures caused surface melting across about 97 percent of the ice sheet. Scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., expect GROVER to detect the layer of the ice sheet that formed in the aftermath of that extreme melt event.

Research with polar rovers costs less than aircraft or satellites, the usual platforms.

"Robots like GROVER will give us a new tool for glaciology studies," said Lora Koenig, a glaciologist at Goddard and science advisor on the project.

GROVER will be joined on the ice sheet in June by another robot, named Cool Robot, developed at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., with funding from the National Science Foundation. This rover can tow a variety of instrument packages to conduct glaciological and atmospheric sampling studies.

GROVER was developed in 2010 and 2011 by teams of students participating in summer engineering boot camps at Goddard. The students were interested in building a rover and approached Koenig about whether a rover could aid her studies of snow accumulation on ice sheets. This information typically is gathered by radars carried on snowmobiles and airplanes. Koenig suggested putting a radar on a rover for this work.

Koenig, now a science advisor on the GROVER Project, asked Hans-Peter Marshall, a glaciologist at Boise State University to bring in his expertise in small, low-power, autonomous radars that could be mounted on GROVER. Since its inception at the boot camp, GROVER has been fine-tuned, with NASA funding, at Boise State.

The tank-like GROVER prototype stands six feet tall, including its solar panels. It weighs about 800 pounds and traverses the ice on two repurposed snowmobile tracks. The robot is powered entirely by solar energy, so it can operate in pristine polar environments without adding to air pollution. The panels are mounted in an inverted V, allowing them to collect energy from the sun and sunlight reflected off the ice sheet.

A ground-penetrating radar powered by two rechargeable batteries rests on the back of the rover. The radar sends radio wave pulses into the ice sheet, and the waves bounce off buried features, informing researchers about the characteristics of the snow and ice layers.

From a research station operated by the National Science Foundation called Summit Camp, a spot where the ice sheet is about 2 miles thick, GROVER will crawl at an average speed of 1.2 mph (2 kilometers per hour). Because the sun never dips below the horizon during the Arctic summer, GROVER can work at any time during the day and should be able to work longer and gather more data than a human on a snowmobile.

At the beginning of the summit tests, Koenig's team will keep GROVER close to camp and communicate with it via Wi-Fi within a three-mile (4.8-kilometer) range. GROVER will transmit snippets of data during the trial to ensure it is working properly but the majority of data will be recovered at the end of the season. The researchers eventually will switch to satellite communications, which will allow the robot to roam farther and transmit data in real time. Ideally, researchers will be able to drive the rover from their desks.

"We think it's really powerful," said Gabriel Trisca, a Boise State master's degree student who developed GROVER's software. "The fact is the robot could be anywhere in the world and we'll be able to control it from anywhere."

Michael Comberiate, a retired NASA engineer and manager of Goddard's Engineering Boot Camp said the Earth-bound Greenland Rover is similar to NASA missions off the planet.

"GROVER is just like a spacecraft but it has to operate on the ground," Comberiate said. "It has to survive unattended for months in a hostile environment, with just a few commands to interrogate it and find out its status and give it some directions for how to accommodate situations it finds itself in."

Koenig hopes more radar data will help shed light on Greenland's snow accumulation. Scientists compare annual accumulation to the volume of ice lost to sea each year to calculate the ice sheet's overall mass balance and its contribution to sea level rise.

For images and a video about GROVER, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/grover.html

Mars: The Next International Destination

Wouldn't this be cool? My bags are packed!
 

The international community is longing for the next big cooperative goal in space exploration. There have been modest partnerships in space since the 1960s -- growing during the Space Shuttle era -- but the International Space Station was a turning point in international cooperation. It was far from a perfect model, but it pulled the various national space agencies closer together than ever before. For more than two decades this partnership grew, worked out technical and cultural differences, and evolved. These nations have managed to build, assemble and now operate the largest structure ever built in space.

ISS is supposed to operate until at least 2020. However, the time to start planning the next large international space mission is now. That mission should be a human mission to Mars. If we wait until ISS ends, we will have not only wasted a lot of time, but potentially wasted the opportunity to harness the expertise, lessons and unity that ISS brings us in space. If we let go of that unity in purpose, we may not get it back.

An international mission also makes sense from a budgetary perspective. Budget and policy pressures are far greater than they were in the 1990s when ISS was started, and that holds true for both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Dividing the costs will increase the total budget of the mission, but will reduce the cost that each nation will need to contribute. The international mission planners will also have the benefit of two decades of international coordination on ISS, which includes development of procedures, hardware integration and interpersonal/intercultural understanding. Without this foundation created by ISS, starting a new international mission would be far more complicated.

Perhaps the greatest potential benefit of an International effort is mission longevity. Over the past few decades, numerous missions and programs have been cancelled because of budgetary pressure, political wrangling and lack of unity of purpose. If ISS had remained an American-only mission, it almost certainly would have been cancelled back in the 1990s. Because it was based on international agreements and treaties, it was much more difficult to cast away and so the mission endured. A similar structure could be created for a Mars mission -- a structure that will provide assurances that the mission can't be easily cancelled by any nation -- one that would build on the positive and negative lessons of ISS.

In the United States, a human mission to Mars is precisely what the nation needs -- and a majority of U.S. citizens agree. A recent poll sponsored by Explore Mars showed that over 70 percent of Americans believe that humans will land on Mars by the early 2030s and more than 65 percent believe that both human and robotic exploration should be pursued. When the same group of people was asked what percentage of the U.S. federal budget NASA accounts for, the average answer was 2.5 percent -- in reality, NASA accounts for less than half of one percent of federal spending.

Despite the troubling economic and budgetary times, there is clear support in the United States for human Mars exploration. In the same survey, participants favored doubling the NASA budget -- to a full one percent -- which would include a human mission to Mars. It is unclear what the level of support is internationally, but there would likely be solid support if a clear and sustainable mission plan is proposed.

It is time that the international community commits to a new mission -- one that will land humans on Mars by the early 2030s.

How a Cat Walked 200 Miles Home: The Amazing Science of Your Cat’s Inner Compass

When a battered, skinny tortoiseshell cat wandered into a yard in Florida earlier this year, she could have been any other stray, but she was nothing of the kind. She carried an implanted microchip—one put there by a loving owner—and it revealed an intriguing story: the cat belonged to a local family, had been lost on a trip two months earlier, and  had traveled 200 miles (322 km) in that time to arrive back in her hometown. Her journey inspired a spate of articles looking for an explanation for how this one cat, and a few others who’ve made similar trips, managed such impressive feats of navigation. The response from many eminent animal researchers was the same: “No idea.”

Cats’ long-distance travels are relatively rare in the scientific literature, which explains the dearth of answers—at least so far. But that’s not the case for the wanderings of sundry other creatures, especially those that migrate. Such extreme journeys—mapless, compassless, sometimes intercontinental, through places theanimals have never seen before—seem nothing short of miraculous. That’s the kind of mystery that gets scientists moving, and move they have, conducting all manner of experiments over the years—locking animals in planetariums, carrying them around in dark boxes, putting them in wading pools wrapped in magnets, and destroying various bits of anatomy to see which piece was the important one. These experiments have yielded fascinating insights into the animal brain and into a world beyond human sensation.

Part of what navigating animals do is not entirely surprising. Planetarium studies reveal that some animals steer by the stars, an approach that’s comfortingly familiar to Homo sapiens but practiced by organisms as distant as the nocturnal dung beetle, which, as one recent study revealed, can roll its precious gob of poo in a straight line only as long as the Milky Way is in view. One of the most accomplished animal navigation researchers of the twentieth century, naturalist Ronald Lockley, found that captured seabirds released far from their homes could make a beeline back so long as either the sun or the stars were visible; an overcast sky threw them off so much that many never made it back.

But plenty of other navigating animals are using something most humans regularly forget exists: the Earth’s magnetic field. In illustrations, the field is usually depicted as a series of loops that emerge from the south pole and reenter the planet at the north pole, and extend out to the edges of our atmosphere, sort of like a cosmic whisk. Our compass needles are designed to align with the field, and in the last few decades it’s become clear that numerous animals can find their way by feeling some of its various field.

Sea turtles, for example, don’t use the field simply to tell north from south. According to experiments led by Kenneth Lohmann, a professor of biology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, they are actually born knowing a magnetic map of the ocean. Newly hatched loggerhead turtles in the populations Lohmann studies journey 8,000 miles (12,900 km) from their hatching beaches around the Atlantic Ocean to reach feeding areas, and if they don’t keep right on track, they do not survive. Lohmann learned early on that the turtles could sense the Earth’s magnetism: he found that hatchlings from the Florida coast, which normally swim east in darkness to start their migration, swam the other way when they were put in a magnetic field that reversed north and south. That got Lohmann thinking that the turtles’ long-distance navigation might be linked to their being able to respond to whorls and quirks in the planetary field they encounter along the way.

To study this, he and colleagues collected baby sea turtles a few hours before they would have left the nest on their own and put them in pools surrounded by magnetic coils. The coils were designed to reproduce the Earth’s magnetic field at specific points along the turtles’ migration. Reliably, the young turtles oriented themselves and swam in the direction relative to the magnetic field that, had they been in the open ocean, would have kept them on course. Lohmann has tested this with 8 different locations along their route, and in each case the turtles head in just the direction required to get them to their destination. The turtles may not know where they are in any big-picture way—as Lohmann says, they may not see themselves as blinking spots on a map—but they have inherited a sense that should they feel a particular pull from the magnetic field, well, better take a right.

The list of animals that navigate by magnetism, suspected and confirmed, is long, and includes a few mammals in addition to migrating birds and turtles. But our understanding of the mechanism behind that ability is sketchy: sea turtles tend to be threatened or endangered species, so scientists can study only their behavior, not their brains, and even in animals in which such work is possible, it’s hard to tell what parts of the brain and other physical structures are involved.

Pigeons, one of the most intensively studied animal navigators, show how complex a question this is. One leading theory holds that iron-containing cells in the beak send magnetic information to the brain, since destroying the nerve that carries sensation from beak to brain seems to disrupt pigeons’ navigation. However, last year it emerged that those beak cells are not neurons capable of sending messages, as had been supposed; they appear to be immune cells, throwing the beak theory into confusion. Another school of thought suggests that the magnetic field may be affecting chemical reactions in the birds’ eyes, literally changing the way the world looks when they are oriented in a particular direction. And David Dickmann, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine whose primary work is on a magical ability we humans often forget we have—our ability to sense gravity and constantly adjust our position to keep our balance—has lately published work showing that pigeons may have a magnetic-field sensor in their inner ears. No one knows yet which of these mechanisms, or what combination of them, is at the root of the pigeon’s powers.

And lest we forget, the magnetic field is far from the only thing out there that navigating animals can sense and humans cannot. The heads of sharks are threaded with jelly-filled tubes, called the ampullae of Lorenzini, that allow them to detect extremely faint electric currents and may help them with navigation. Scents in the air, at concentrations far below human perception, are perceivable to numerous creatures that may use them to steer (in fact, pigeons that cannot smell seem oddly lost, even with their magnetic abilities intact). Bees can see patterns in sunlight invisible to the naked human eye and can use them to find their way.

We can see only the outcomes, never the workings, of whatever evolved systems animals use to orient themselves across hundreds or thousands of miles. But that hasn’t stopped us from working to understand the feats of migrating reptiles, homing pigeons, and even lost pets. With reminders like the odyssey of the Florida housecat, how can we stop?