Robotic Recon

The data captured by K10 during yesterday's basin scouting were downloaded to the science team today. The science team spent the morning analyzing that data to aid in strategies for afternoon planning. The data analysis step completed the first robotic scouting cycle for the "North Area" science team.

We are now equiped with a thorough understanding of the tools at our disposal and the process by which we can maximize the science return from geologic exploration of the Black Point Lava Flow in northern Arizona.

As part of the assessment team, we monitor telemetry from the rover and compute performance measures in real-time. After over a week in the field test, K10 has become pretty familiar to us. We've watched the rover use a variety of instruments and settings to collect gigabytes of data. And we've marveled at the rover operating with lossy comm. and elevated battery temperatures in the desert afternoon.

Today we used the K10 robot to scout a "basin" area at Black Point. The ground control team at the NASA Lunar Science Institute remotely operated K10 for 6 hours and covered more than 1km of distance. This map shows the recon data that we collected: yellow "M" squares indicate terrain images taken with K10's "microscopic imager" (50 micron/pixel) and green "P" wedges indicate GigaPan (gigapan.org) panoramas.

Hi, my name is Frank Jurgens and I normally work in Shuttle and Exploration Robotics Operations (Mission Operations Directorate) at NASA Johnson Space Center. Today, however, I worked as Flight Director for the K10 robotic recon test.

Overall, we had a very productive day scouting with the K10 robot. We started early today due to the excessive heat in the testing area. By getting an early start we hoped to get more done before the heat would shut us down.

The science team's main objective today was to develop a strategy for scouting the "North Area" of Black Point Lava Flow. We focused on analyzing satellite imagery, identifying the top science priorities, coming up with a list of questions about science merit or operational risk, and developing a plan to use the robotic recon to answer those questions. This map shows the overall strategy for the next few days.

We finished scouting the "West Area" of Black Point Lava Flow today. K10 drove about 800 meters and took images of the terrain with its microscopic imager, several GigaPan (gigapan.org) panoramas, and a variety of lidar scans.

We use Google Earth extensively for K10 robot planning and operations. It's a great tool because it's very flexible as a map viewer, allows us to put in lots of different kinds of content (image overlays, points and polygons, etc.) and provides one context for looking at our field site data, robot plans, robot activities, and the data we have collected.

After two days of weather and communications difficulties in the field, we were able to resume normal science operations on Saturday. Because it has been difficult at times establishing high-bandwidth communications to K10, which is needed for our fully-interactive "lunar mode" of remote operations, we decided to try using "Mars Mode" instead.

This image shows a map of precipitation (green) in relation to the three recon areas that we’ve visited this week, with the gold star at K10's current location. Unfortunately, the storm seems to be sitting directly over all our regions of interest! Everyone is taking a break while we wait for the weather to clear.

During one of K10's traverses, GigaPan images were taken of what seemed to be flat ground. The area was initially deemed traversable by the ground control team. However, the subsequent 3D lidar images of the same area revealed a 1 meter deep trench shown extending to the top right corner of the image. The 3D data enabled us to measure the distance, relative location and slope of the trench to determine that the path across that area is not traversable. This enabled us to divert the traverse path of the rover and continue our plan safely.