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No Sour GRAPEs: Autonomous-Drone Testing to Improve Future Mars Research

A team from Los Alamos National Laboratory recently went to the Haughton Impact Crater on Devon Island, Canada — a frigid environment similar to Mars. “We can use Haughton as a Mars analog to study Mars on Earth in the name of the GRAPE mission (gamma rotorcraft for analog planetary environments),” said Team Leader Nina Lanza. Watch this video to learn more.

Topics:
Aerospace Autonomy Motion Control Unmanned Air Vehicles/Systems (UAV/UAS)

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 [Music] hot and crater is an impact structure so what that means is that a rock from space fell into Earth and made a huge hole Haughton is on Devon Island which is in the Canadian Arctic so this big rock impacted 31 million years ago and left this giant hole that we see today and what makes it such a good Mars analog is that this entire island is

    00:00:26 frozen because it's in the Arctic so this is just like Mars Mars is a cold place covered in impact craters so we can use Hoten as a Mars analog to study Mars on Earth the name of the grape mission is actually short for gamma rotorcraft for analog planetary environments and so why we do grape is actually to try to understand how we can use rotorcraft or drones to better

    00:00:52 understand environments on Mars and Beyond so we planned to take the great Mission concept to Haughton for about 15 days in the Canadian Arctic in July of 2022 to test out some new instrument techniques and measurement techniques that we hope to one day apply to Mars getting to Devon island is not easy there's a certain point at which you

    00:01:16 can't take a commercial flight once you get to Resolute which is on Cornwallis Island you can't take a commercial flight anywhere North so you have to charter a flight so we worked with the Canadian government to actually get our entire field team and all of our equipment to Devon Island this is where we have our tents so we've got 17 people staying here so 17 tenths

    00:01:39 inside of this uh enclosure the enclosure is for polar bears so we have posts arranged all the way around with essentially bear bangers attached to the posts that will trigger if a bear tries to come through the fence at night it's deactivated during the day and this is basically so that if a bear tries to come into Camp it not only uh tries to freak out the bear but it'll alert us

    00:02:05 that there is something trying to get into camp and we should be aware of it the goal of the great mission was to do two things one we wanted to compare what it would be like to select sampling sites from the air if we only had images to what we would consider the gold standard which would be geologists on the ground so we took data in these two different ways we also wanted to take

    00:02:26 measurements using a chemistry technique to try to understand how those sites were different and we were looking for things like the chemistry of life so to better understand where might we find biosignatures in these samples that we've selected from the air and from the ground I'm back here in Neutron Valley with my colleague Ann who you can see behind me

    00:02:47 we got Neutron data in this area on a number of rocks that we selected both through a foot Traverse and also through drone and now we're back to get some handheld lives [Music] foreign what's in there a lot of magnesium as part of the grape project we used two different drones that could image from

    00:03:11 above so we were able to make maps of the areas where we wanted to sample we could also take some really beautiful images one of the most surprising results that I think we found from grape was just that the site selected from the Drone were actually comparable to what the geologists were picking on the ground so I think this gives us a lot of confidence that we can use drone based

    00:03:32 systems to really do good geology on other planets the dream goal of grape is to be able to make autonomous drone platforms that can go make measurements on other planets and make decisions about what to do next without having humans making that decision doing field work isn't easy and it also takes a lot of resources so I feel really lucky that our team was supported by Los Alamos

    00:03:56 National Laboratory as well as the Explorers Club and Discovery Incorporated to be able to gather these data in this unique place on Earth