As humanity prepares to return people to the Moon it is becoming urgent that we understand how to accurately map and utilize resources on the Lunar Surface. While spacecraft orbiting the Moon, like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, can provide a broad understanding of what is there, detailed understanding requires in situ investigation and one PSI team is designing an autonomous rover to map the way for future astronauts to explore.
At the NASA Exploration Science Forum (NESF) in St Louis, MO, PSI Senior Scientist Eldar Noe Dobrea presented the TREX collaboration’s work with the Zoë rover, which was developed by Carnegie Mellon University. This rover was tested in the American Southwest with the goal of demonstrating if the rover could autonomously navigate the terrain and acquire the data necessary to differentiate between different possible geologic explanations for the landscape.
As Dobrea explained at NESF, the team prepared hypothesis maps of what might be there, and weighted the maps according to the a priori likelihood of the maps being correct. For instance, a hypothesis about the origins of a landscape can be tied to different minerals that should be present if the hypothesis is correct. The rover can then map minerals and identify which geologic features can be proven to map to specific kinds of origins (or other questions) and to what degree of certainty (the presence of multiple minerals can make a definitive result impossible). In general, as more and more minerals are collected, the rover’s algorithms can converge on a single hypothesis being most likely (see figure).
Since this rover is capable of doing onboard mineral analysis, this new method of mapping surfaces is limited by what the rover can do, exploration can be accelerated. As stated in the team’s abstract. “Under the proposed paradigm,… the rover can analyze the data it acquires, use it to weigh the hypotheses, and transmit only the relevant subset of the data; knowledge gain is thus constrained by the rover’s data processing rate, rather than data transmission rate.” In the past, the rate of data transfer has been a limiting factor on investigation using remote missions.
While Zoë was tested in our world’s deserts, the software she used demonstrated what future rovers such as the VIPER rover or Endurance rover may one day accomplish. Here is to a future where our robots can test researchers’ ideas in dangerous environments, preparing a safe and well understood path for the scientists who will follow.
Eldar Noe Doebra presents at the NASA Space Exploration Forum on July 24, 2024.
