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PSI hosted a meeting of the Toolbox for Research and Exploration (TREX) project, a five-year, $5.5 million program led by PSI’s Amanda Hendrix to advance basic and applied research for lunar and planetary science, and advance human exploration of the Solar System.
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The gathering was the first TREX Theme 4 in-person meeting. Theme 4 is the TREX fieldwork theme; in years three and four of the TREX project, Theme 4 participants plan on going into the field (to sites in Arizona and Washington state). The goals of the work are to take a robotic rover into the field, outfitted with instruments and software to do autonomous sample selection.
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At the meeting scientists discussed the rover itself and its capabilities, the instruments that the rover will carry (including UV, FTIR, gamma/neutron spectrometer, VNIR instruments) and the software that will ingest the instrument data to determine what materials are being observed; hypothesis testing software can then decide whether an observed sample will address a given science question.
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Above, fifth from left, David Wettergreen from Carnegie Mellon, a TREX co-investigator, discusses the rover. Listening are, from left, PSI’s Roger Clark, Shawn Wright, Mikki Osterloo, a TREX co-investigator from LASP/Univ. Colorado, PSI’s Melissa Lane, Darby Dyar, Amanda Hendrix and Eldar Noe Dobrea.
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