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Michael Mewhinney                   April 1, 2003
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Phone: 650/604-3937 or 650/604-9000
E-mail: Michael.Mewhinney{at}nasa.gov

Anne Watzman
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Penn.
Phone: 412/268-3830
E-mail: aw16{at}andrew.cmu.edu

RELEASE: 03-19AR
NASA, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY TO TEST ROBOT IN CHILE

A team of NASA and Carnegie Mellon University scientists will travel 
to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile April 1 to conduct research 
that will help them develop and deploy a robot and instruments that 
may someday enable other robots to find life on Mars.

The researchers will be using the Atacama, described as one of the 
most arid regions on Earth, as a martian analog. NASA Ames Research 
Center is providing the autonomy technology for the research, which 
is part of NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring 
the Planets (ASTEP) project.

"This field campaign is a good example of what we hope to accomplish 
with NASA's ASTEP program," said Michael Meyer, senior scientist for 
astrobiology and the 2001 Mars Odyssey program scientist, NASA 
Headquarters.  "By pushing the limits of technology in harsh 
environments, we'll also push the known limits of life on Earth and 
be better prepared to search for life on other worlds," Meyer added.

"Our goal is to make genuine discoveries about the limits of life on
Earth and to generate knowledge that can be applied to future NASA
missions to Mars," said project leader David Wettergreen, a research 
scientist at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. "We will conduct 
three annual field experiments in the Atacama. Each time, an 
increasingly capable robot will use sensing and intelligence to find 
land forms or environmental conditions that could harbor life."

The group is funded with a $3 million, three-year grant from NASA to 
the university's Robotics Institute. The group is collaborating with 
scientists at Carnegie Mellon's Molecular Biosensor and Imaging 
Center, who have a $900,000 grant from NASA to develop fluorescent 
dyes and automated microscopes that the robot will eventually use to 
locate various forms of life.

This year, the team will be using an autonomous, solar-powered robot 
named Hyperion, to determine the optimum design, software and 
instrumentation for a new robot that will be used in the more 
extensive experiments to be conducted over the next two years.

In 2001, scientists tested Hyperion on Devon Island in the Canadian 
Arctic, where it successfully demonstrated a concept called 
sun-synchronous navigation. The robot tracked the sun as a source of 
power and explored its surroundings as it traveled continuously 
through a 24-hour period of daylight.

During this year's visit to the Atacama, researchers will focus on 
measurements and experiments with the robot's hardware and software 
components. They will test Hyperion as it travels through the desert 
and collect data with scientific instruments, including a 
fluorescence imager, near-infrared spectrometer, and a 
high-resolution panoramic imager. 

Wettergreen said that Hyperion will travel some 10 kilometers through 
the desert this year, while researchers study issues related to 
robotic autonomy. The robot's solar panels have been laid flat on top 
of its body for the upcoming experiments so it can capture the 
maximum amount of sunlight in the equatorial environment. In the 
Arctic, the panels were mounted vertically, like sails on a boat, 
because the sun was often low on the horizon.

A next-generation robot, developed from the findings of this year's 
work, should perform 50 kilometers of autonomous traverse in the 
desert in 2004. In 2005, the final year of the project, a robot 
equipped with a full array of instruments should operate autonomously 
as it travels 200 kilometers over a two-month period. During this 
climactic journey, the robot should map sites where life is abundant, 
and then move into drier areas where life has not been detected.

In 2005, plans call for the science team to operate as if it were 
exploring Mars in a scenario that would include a time delay and 
limited communication. "We'll operate under the constraints of 
martian exploration in order to better develop procedures for seeking 
life on another planet," Wettergreen said. "The robot will monitor 
its own power, balance, locomotion, communication and science 
operations as it goes. It needs to be able to move into unknown 
terrain using cameras and internal sensors -- the same instruments 
and information that would be available to a robot exploring Mars."

Nathalie Cabrol, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center 
and the SETI Institute, will lead the science team for the 
investigation of the Atacama. Members of the science team are 
geologists and biologists who study both Earth and Mars at 
institutions including NASA Ames and NASA Johnson Space Center, the 
SETI Institute, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of 
Arizona, the University of Tennessee, Carnegie Mellon and Universidad 
Catolica del Norte (Chile).

"The role of the science team is to develop new astrobiological 
exploration strategies that will help the science community to better 
understand both the limits of life on Earth in one of its most arid 
deserts where water and microorganic life are extremely scarce, and 
also to derive automated life search and detection scenarios for 
future missions to Mars," Cabrol said.  "This project will field test 
innovative combinations of science instruments and new rover search 
modes. If life appeared once on Mars and has been preserved in some 
way, whether as fossils or extant communities, it is then critical 
that future missions be capable of automatically and unambiguously 
detecting it. This project is aiming at achieving this goal in the 
Atacama in three years as a stepping stone to Mars."

For more information, updates and images from the Atacama beginning 
April 7 visit:

  http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/atacama.

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