(Press-News.org) Defying 30 mph gusts and temperatures down to minus 22 F, NASA's new polar rover recently demonstrated in Greenland that it could operate completely autonomously in one of Earth's harshest environments.
The robot known as GROVER, which stands for both Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research, was designed by teams of students attending engineering boot camps at Goddard in the summers of 2010 and 2011. Built to carry a ground-penetrating radar to analyze layers of snow and ice, the rover was later transferred to Boise State University for fine-tuning with NASA funding.
Although researchers had tested GROVER at a beach in Maryland and in the snow in Idaho, the May 6 to June 8 testing at Summit Camp, the highest spot in Greenland, was the rover's first polar experience. One of the main goals was proving that the robot could execute commands sent from afar over an Iridium satellite connection – an objective GROVER accomplished.
"When we saw it moving and travelling to the locations our professor had keyed in from Boise, we knew all of our hard work had paid off," said Gabriel Trisca, a graduate student from Boise State University who has been involved in the GROVER project from its start. "GROVER has grown to be a fully-autonomous, GPS-guided and satellite-linked platform for scientific research." Trisca accompanied the robot to Greenland.
GROVER collected and stored radar data over 18 miles during the five weeks it spent on the ice. During the testing, the rover was also able to transmit information in real time on how its onboard systems were performing. The robot's solar-charged batteries allowed it to operate for up to 12 hours before having to recharge.
"When you work at the poles, on the ice, it's cold, it's tiring, it's expensive and there's a limit to how much ground you can cover on snowmobiles," said Lora Koenig, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It would be great if autonomous robotic platforms could do part of this work -- especially the part where high winds and blowing snow try to freeze your skin."
Though researchers had initially expected the 800-pound robot to work around the clock and cover more ground, the extreme polar conditions took a toll on GROVER's electronics, battery consumption and mobility.
"This is very common the first time you take an instrument into an environment like Greenland," said Hans-Peter Marshall, a geoscientist at Boise State University and science adviser on the project. "It's always more challenging than you thought it was going to be: Batteries don't recharge as fast and they don't last as long, and it takes computers and instrumentation longer to boot."
Another challenge was the uneven icy terrain. The researchers had to repeatedly tinker with the rover's speed and the power sent to each of its two autonomous tracks so that the robot would not get stuck in the snow.
GROVER's radar emits a signal that bounces off the different layers of the ice sheet, allowing scientists to study how snow and ice accumulates in Greenland. The team wanted to check whether the robot could see a layer in the ice sheet that formed after an extreme melt event in the summer of 2012. Marshall said a first analysis of GROVER's radar data revealed it was sufficient to detect the melt layer and potentially estimate its thickness.
Though currently the radar information is stored onboard and retrieved afterward, the GROVER team wants to switch to a geostationary satellite connection that will let the robot transmit large volumes of data in real time. Other possible changes include replacing components that are hard to manipulate in the cold (like switches and wires), merging the two onboard computers to reduce energy consumption, and using wind generators to create more power or adding a sled carrying additional solar panels.
GROVER's test in Greenland coincided with the field-testing of a smaller, non-autonomous and faster robot called CoolRobot, built by Dartmouth College. Marshall said that in the future, he would like to see the different science teams that are currently developing polar rovers work together to create a pool of robotic platforms, which glaciologists could borrow from for their studies.
"One thing I can imagine is having a big robot like GROVER with several smaller ones that can move radially outwards to increase the swath GROVER would cover," Marshall said. "Also, we've been thinking about bringing back smaller platforms to a larger one to recharge."
"An army of polar robots – that would be neat," Koenig said.
INFORMATION:
NASA's polar robotic ranger passes first Greenland test
2013-07-09
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Inhibiting macrophage MerTK signaling creates an innate immune response against cancer
2013-07-09
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - The tyrosine kinase MerTK plays a prominent role in the body's immune response. MerTK signaling helps "calm" the body's first line of immunity, the macrophage, while it performs the routine duties - clearing cells that die and healing damaged tissue.
New evidence by a University of North Carolina-led team published online on July 8 by the Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that MerTK macrophage action in the microenvironment that surrounds cancer cells blunts the immune response, allowing the tumor cell to grow and metastasize. The study, led ...
Corals cozy up with bacterial buddies
2013-07-09
Corals may let certain bacteria get under its skin, according to a new study by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and soon to be published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The study offers the first direct evidence that Stylophora pistillata, a species of reef-building coral found throughout the Indian and west Pacific Oceans, harbors bacterial denizens deep within its tissues.
"We have evidence that other species of coral also host these bacteria, and that they ...
Consuming soy peptide may reduce colon cancer metastasis
2013-07-09
URBANA, Ill. – After a recent University of Illinois study showed that injection of the soy peptide lunasin dramatically reduced colon cancer metastasis in mice, the researchers were eager to see how making lunasin part of the animals' daily diet would affect the spread of the disease.
"In this new study, we find that giving lunasin orally at 20 mg/kg of body weight reduced the number of metastatic tumors by 94 percent—we went from 18 tumors to only one. And that was done using lunasin alone; no other type of therapy was used," said Elvira de Mejia, a U of I professor ...
Nurse practitioners provide more primary care in states with least restrictive regulations
2013-07-09
Facing a nationwide shortage of primary care physicians, some states in recent years have eased up on regulations that create barriers for nurse practitioners who want to work as primary care providers.
That easing of rules has had the intended effect. According to a new study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, those states with the fewest restrictions on nurse practitioners' scope of practice had two-and-a-half times more patients receiving primary care from nurse practitioners than did the most restrictive states.
"We wanted to look ...
In baseball, bigger still better
2013-07-09
DURHAM, N.C. -- Max Scherzer leads Major League Baseball in wins. As a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, he hasn't lost a game this season.
His 6-foot, 3-inch frame is a telling example of constructal-law theory, said Duke University engineer Adrian Bejan. The theory predicts that elite pitchers will continue to be taller and thus throw faster and seems also to apply to athletes who compete in golf, hockey and boxing.
Studying athletes -- since most sports are meticulous in keeping statistics -- provides an insight into the biological evolution of human design in nature, ...
Ethical quandary about vaccinations sparked by tension between parental rights and protecting public health
2013-07-09
NEW YORK, July 8, 2013 – Increased concerns about the perceived risk of vaccination, inconvenience, or religious tenets are leading more U.S. parents to opt-out of vaccinating their children. Parents are increasingly able to do so in states that have relatively simple procedures for immunization exemption, report researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center in the July issue of Health Affairs. Some states, fearing a public health crisis, have responded by putting in place more burdensome procedures for parents of school-aged children to opt-out.
All this adds up to an ethical ...
Glimpse into the future of acidic oceans shows ecosystems transformed
2013-07-09
Ocean acidification may create an impact similar to extinction on
marine ecosystems, according to a study released today by the
University of California, Davis.
The study, published online in the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, found that ocean acidification can
degrade not only individual species, as past studies have shown, but
entire ecosystems. This results in a homogenized marine community,
dominated by fewer plants and animals.
"The background, low-grade stress caused by ocean acidification can
cause a whole shift in the ecosystem ...
Nearly half of sarcoma surgeries done by nonsurgical oncology specialists
2013-07-09
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Orthopedic oncologists and surgical oncologists, who have been trained in the complex procedures required to remove sarcomas located deep in the muscles and other soft tissues of the limbs, conducted only 52 percent of these operations at 85 academic medical centers during a three year period, according to an analysis of national data by UC Davis researchers that is published online today in the Journal of Surgical Oncology.
The remaining 48 percent of these sarcoma surgeries were conducted by general surgeons, plastic surgeons and orthopedic surgeons, ...
NASA sees Tropical Storm Chantal develop quickly in Atlantic
2013-07-09
The third tropical cyclone of the Atlantic Ocean season developed in the Atlantic and not in the Gulf of Mexico as the previous two systems,Tropical Storm Chantal.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Storm Chantal on July 7 at 12:15 p.m. EDT when it was located off the coast of Brazil. The highest and strongest thunderstorms (that cast shadows on the surrounding lower storms) were around the center of circulation.
On Monday, July 8, Chantal was nearing land ...
Medical safety innovation gets a boost from systematic analysis
2013-07-09
PHILADELPHIA (July 8, 2013)— If all medical errors were counted together as a single cause, they would likely rank as the third leading cause of death in the United States. As health care personnel race to improve the quality of their care to save lives and prevent unneeded harm, a new study indicates there is more they can do to learn about what errors are occurring and why.
Researchers from the Drexel University School of Public Health demonstrated a systematic analysis of hospital administrative data for patient safety at a population level, in a recent paper in the ...