Lunar and Planetary Mapping and Modeling: LMMP, Vesta Trek, Mars Trek
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Law, Emily↗
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Mars Trek: An Interactive Web Portal for Current and Future Missions to Mars
NASA's Mars Trek (https://marstrek.jpl.nasa.gov) provides a web-based Portal and a suite of interactive visualization and analysis tools to enable mission planners, lunar scientists, and engineers to access mapped data products from past and current missions to Mars. During the past year, the capabilities and data served by Mars Trek have been significantly expanded beyond its original design as a public outreach tool. At the request of NASA's Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration Operations Mission Directorate, Mars Trek's technology and capabilities are now being extended to support site selection and analysis activities for the first human missions to Mars.
Mars Trek↗
Extending the Lunar Mapping and Modeling Portal - New Capabilities and New Worlds
NASA's Lunar Mapping and Modeling Portal (LMMP) provides a web-based Portal and a suite of interactive visualization and analysis tools to enable mission planners, lunar scientists, and engineers to access mapped lunar data products from past and current lunar missions (http://lmmp.nasa.gov). During the past year, the capabilities and data served by LMMP have been significantly expanded. New interfaces are providing improved ways to access and visualize data. At the request of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, LMMP's technology and capabilities are now being extended to additional planetary bodies. New portals for Vesta and Mars are the first of these new products to be released. This presentation will provide an overview of LMMP, Vesta Trek, and Mars Trek, demonstrate their uses and capabilities, highlight new features, and preview coming enhancements.
Site Selection↗
NASA's Solar System Treks: Online Portals for Planetary Mapping and Modeling
NASA's Solar System Treks are a suite of web-based of lunar and planetary mapping and modeling portals providing interactive visualization and analysis tools enabling mission planners, planetary scientists, students, and the general public to access mapped lunar data products from past and current missions for the Moon, Mars, Vesta, and more. New portals for additional planetary bodies are being planned. This presentation will recap significant enhancements to these toolsets during the past year and look ahead to future features and releases. Moon Trek is a new portal replacing its predecessor, the Lunar Mapping and Modeling Portal (LMMP), that significantly upgrades and builds upon the capabilities of LMMP. It features greatly improved navigation, 3D visualization, fly-overs, performance, and reliability. Additional data products and tools continue to be added. These include both generalized products as well as polar data products specifically targeting potential sites for NASA's Resource Prospector mission as well as for missions being planned by NASA's international partners. The latest release of Mars Trek includes new tools and data products requested by NASA's Planetary Science Division to support site selection and analysis for Mars Human Landing Exploration Zone Sites. Also being given very high priority by NASA Headquarters is Mars Trek's use as a means to directly involve the public in upcoming missions, letting them explore the areas the agency is focusing upon, understand what makes these sites so fascinating, follow the selection process, and get caught up in the excitement of exploring Mars. Phobos Trek, the latest effort in the Solar System Treks suite, is being developed in coordination with the International Phobos/Deimos Landing Site Working Group, with landing site selection and analysis for JAXA's MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) mission as a primary driver.
Day, Brian↗
Two Years Onboard the MER Opportunity Rover
The Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) system provides automated data collection for planetary rovers. AEGIS is currently being used onboard the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission's Opportunity to provide autonomous targeting of the MER Panoramic camera. Prior to AEGIS, targeted data was collected in a manual fashion where targets were manually identified in images transmitted to Earth and the rover had to remain in the same location for one to several communication cycles. AEGIS enables targeted data to be rapidly acquired with no delays for ground communication. Targets are selected by AEGIS through the use of onboard data analysis techniques that are guided by scientist-specified objectives. This paper provides an overview of the how AEGIS has been used on the Opportunity rover, focusing on usage that occurred during a 21 kilometer historic trek to the Mars Endeavour crater.
Mars Exploration Rover (MER)↗
Mars Look-Alike
This video presentation describes a research trek to western Antarctica to study it's ecosystem as a first step in the future exploration of Mars.
Source record↗
Space Rescue
Space Rescue has been a topic of speculation for a wide community of people for decades. Astronauts, aerospace engineers, diplomats, medical and rescue professionals, inventors and science fiction writers have all speculated on this problem. Martin Caidin's 1964 novel Marooned dealt with the problems of rescuing a crew stranded in low earth orbit. Legend at the Johnson Space Center says that Caidin's portrayal of a Russian attempt to save the American crew played a pivotal role in convincing the Russians to join the real joint Apollo-Soyuz mission. Space Rescue has been a staple in science fiction television and movies portrayed in programs such as Star Trek, Stargate-SG1 and Space 1999 and movies such as Mission To Mars and Red Planet. As dramatic and as difficult as rescue appears in fictional accounts, in the real world it has even greater drama and greater difficulty. Space rescue is still in its infancy as a discipline and the purpose of this chapter is to describe the issues associated with space rescue and the work done so far in this field. For the purposes of this chapter, the term space rescue will refer to any system which allows for rescue or escape of personnel from situations which endanger human life in a spaceflight operation. This will span the period from crew ingress prior to flight through crew egress postlanding. For the purposes of this chapter, the term primary system will refer to the spacecraft system that a crew is either attempting to escape from or from which an attempt is being made to rescue the crew.
Muratore, John F.↗
Visualization and Analysis of Solar System Small Bodies with NASA's Solar System Treks Project
In its investigations of Vesta and Ceres, NASA’s Dawn mission has returned spectacular data detailing the surfaces of these two prominent small bodies in our Solar System’s asteroid belt. In order to greatly facilitate dissemination, visualization, and analysis of this data, and public understanding of the mission, the Dawn mission has partnered with NASA’s Solar System Treks Project (SSTP). SSTP has recently released an update to the Vesta Trek online portal (https://trek.nasa.gov/vesta/) and has released a new Ceres Trek portal (https://trek.nasa.gov/ceres/). This presentation will showcase the use of the Ceres Trek and Vesta Trek portals and demonstrate how they can be used to visualize and analyze particularly interesting landforms such as the pitted terrain on Vesta and relic cryovolcanoes on Ceres. We will also demonstrate the new VR capability that has been added to the portals, allowing users to generate their own virtual reality flyovers for any user-defined paths along the bodies’ surfaces. In addition to highlighting the portals for Ceres and Vesta, the presentation will preview additional portals being planned/developed for other small bodies. NASA and JAXA have requested the development of a portal for the asteroid Ryugu to facilitate dissemination, visualization, and analysis of data from Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission, and a portal for Mars’ moon Phobos in support of mission planning for Japan’s MMX mission. We are also planning a portal for the asteroid Bennu with data from the OSIRIS-Rex mission. All of these products are efforts in the NASA Solar System Treks Project (SSTP), available at https://trek.nasa.gov. NASA's Solar System Trek online portals provide web-based suites of interactive data visualization and analysis tools to enable mission planners, planetary scientists, students, and the general public to access mapped data products from past and current missions for a growing number of planetary bodies including the Moon, Mars, Vesta, etc. These portals are being used for site selection and analysis by NASA and a number of its international partners, supporting upcoming missions. In addition to demonstrating the capabilities of selected portals in this presentation, we will solicit input from the community for ideas for future enhancements to the portals.
Day, Brian↗
On Beyond Star Trek, the Role of Synthetic Biology in Nasa's Missions
The time has come to for NASA to exploit the nascent field of synthetic biology in pursuit of its mission, including aeronautics, earth science, astrobiology and notably, human exploration. Conversely, NASA advances the fundamental technology of synthetic biology as no one else can because of its unique expertise in the origin of life and life in extreme environments, including the potential for alternate life forms. This enables unique, creative "game changing" advances. NASA's requirement for minimizing upmass in flight will also drive the field toward miniaturization and automation. These drivers will greatly increase the utility of synthetic biology solutions for military, health in remote areas and commercial purposes. To this end, we have begun a program at NASA to explore the use of synthetic biology in NASA's missions, particularly space exploration. As part of this program, we began hosting an iGEM team of undergraduates drawn from Brown and Stanford Universities to conduct synthetic biology research at NASA Ames Research Center. The 2011 team (http://2011.igem.org/Team:Brown-Stanford) produced an award-winning project on using synthetic biology as a basis for a human Mars settlement and the 2012 team has expanded the use of synthetic biology to estimate the potential for life in the clouds of other planets (http://2012.igem.org/Team:Stanford-Brown; http://www.calacademy.org/sciencetoday/igem-competition/). More recent projects from the Stanford-Brown team have expanded our ideas of how synthetic biology can aid NASA's missions from "Synthetic BioCommunication" (http://2013.igem.org/Team:Stanford-Brown) to a "Biodegradable UAS (drone)" in collaboration with Spelman College (http://2014.igem.org/Team:StanfordBrownSpelman#SBS%20iGEM) and most recently, "Self-Folding Origami" (http://2015.igem.org/Team:Stanford-Brown), the winner of the 2015 award for Manufacturing.
miniaturization and automation↗
Chemical Composition by the APXS along the Downhill Traverse of the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit at Gusev Crater
The Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) onboard the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit continues to determine the elemental composition of samples at Gusev Crater. Starting around sol 600 the rover descended Husband Hill, which is part of the Columbia Hills, visited the inner basin with a large dune field, called 'El Dorado', and parked at Low Ridge to conserve energy during the martian winter. Many unique samples were discovered by the instruments onboard Spirit during her downhill traverse. Here, we report only on the chemical data obtained by the APXS. The compositions of some of the soil samples are comparable to the mean soil determined along the earlier traverse. However, a light-toned subsurface sample (disturbed by the rover wheels), called Dead Sea Samra , showed the highest sulfur content of all soil samples, the lowest Na, Mg, Al, Cl, K, Ca, Ti, Mn, and Zn, among the lowest Si and P, and among the highest Cr, Fe and Ni. Assuming ferric sulfate as a major mineral, large amounts of a pure silica phase must be present. Color and quantity of Dead Sea Samra resemble somewhat an earlier soil called Paso Robles , though the latter is a mixture of sulfates with phosphate-rich soil. Manganese in Dead Sea Samra is so low that the Fe/Mn ratio exceeds 300, a value that has never been found previously on Mars (Fe/Mn ratio of 46 for Gusev basalts), indicating that only Fe(3+) occurs. The dune field El Dorado contained granulated material that exhibited the highest Mg and Ni concentrations and the lowest S and Cl compared to all other soils implying an enrichment of olivine-rich sands. Two outcrops, called Algonquin and Comanche , revealed compositions that differ significantly from those of earlier outcrops as they have the highest concentrations of Mg, Fe, and Ni (except for Ni in Independence) and the lowest of Al, K (detection limit), Ca, and Ti of all brushed and almost all abraded rocks. Normative estimates assign them the highest olivine contents ever found for martian rocks and a very mafic nature based on their high Mg/(Mg+Fe) and low Al, Ca and Na. Their significantly high Ni contents point to a different source than the Gusev plains basalts. The elemental compositions of samples encountered during the downhill traverse revealed a larger chemical diversity of the Columbia Hills than the uphill trek already published.
Bruckner, J.↗
Strategies and Recommended Targets for Mars Surveyor Program Landing Sites
The two major constraints for selecting the Mars Surveyor Program (MSP) 2001 landing site at the time of this meeting are latitude (30'N to 15S) and elevation (< 2.5 km). The latitude belt will be narrowed down to a 15' sector after this workshop. This mission will demonstrate the capability to perform a precision landing, with the goal of achieving an accuracy of approximately 10 km, 3-sigma. There will be at least two different landing sites ('01 and '03) selected in the MSP. However, there should be an option of having the '05 sample return mission land in a different site and the '05 mission should be equipped with a rover for two reasons. The reasoning behind this follows: '05 lander/rover package should have the option of going to an independent site from either '01 or '03 because predecessor missions (orbital) may locate the "Ultimate Site"; '05 needs a rover to either: (A) explore and sample this "ultimate site" for sample return; (B) retrieve samples from '01 or '03 rovers, as a contingency, in case these rovers malfunction and cannot negotiate the trek back to the sample return vehicle.
Rice, James W., Jr.↗