It takes more than a quick drop in the lake to get the DeepWorker’s ready to go. Check out this video for some behind the scene action won what it takes to get the subs ready for flight.
Tyler, one of the MarsLIfe crew is so excited about PLRP that he is writing about his experiences in his own blog here
We’re up and almost running. A 16 km drive down the Kelly Lake Road with crane, barge, DeepWorker submersibles and Nuytco crew in tow – the barge is assembled and ready to go! The Nuytco and PLRP crew worked hard piecing together the barge, which will serve as a platform to launch the DeepWorkers. Subs due to launch around noon tomorrow. Check the barge assemble process in the photos below.
Mars life crew went back to Pavilion Lake to confirm preliminary data from last season. The divers sampled surface water in the central basin of the lake, and the 3 poles transect at 85 feet; both water and microbialites. These samples will be examined for total community analysis, metabolic potential and metabolic function. Check out the sample collection photos below. The Sea Monkey’s are a favorite.
Hello from the Johnson Space Center, home of human space flight operations. I am Lauren Rush, this year’s mission planner, and this my first Kelly Lake blog entry for the 2011 deepworker operations. You can read my bio here. First of all, I am so happy to be a part of the Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP)… or are we changing the name to Kelly Lake Research Project for this year? Better yet, how about Deepworker Research Project? I guess it doesn’t matter what you call it. This is a super neat science and exploration project that I and my team are psyched to be involved in this year. Allow me to introduce the rest of my team in today’s blog and explain what we do for PLRP. My team coordinates the planning and operations efforts between the mission planning team and the PLRP scientists and experts. For the last 5 or so years at Johnson Space Center, I’ve been mostly focused in the shuttle world, planning the days of shuttle missions. But you would be surprised to learn there are similarities between a day on shuttle and a day at Kelly Lake. I hope to blog about this in the next couple of months.
I am joined by Matt Fox, an expert in International Space Station mission planning. Matt has worked so hard to put together this year’s mission plan, a timeline for each activity that happens both at the lake and the base camp. The mission plan is a highly integrated, logistical illustration of how each day lays out and how mission objectives are accomplished. Basically we coordinate where the project participants should go and when they should be there. That is a lot of work considering there are about 80 participants this year and all kind of activities going on, including submarine operations, boat operations, dive operations, barge operations, data analysis, mobile Mission Control Center (mMCC), community and media events, and base camp activities.
Ron Stueber, Matt Fox and Lauren Rush
Lastly, Matt and I are accompanied by Ron Stueber, who is both an expert in analog missions, like PLRP, as well as the software tools we are using to plan this mission. A little background about the scheduling tool that you will see me mention in the future is that it is called Score. And surprisingly enough, Score is not an acronym for anything, as we use lots of acronyms around here at NASA. Score is being developed by Ames Research Center (ARC) for planning use on International Space Station and future exploration programs. Score leverages the scheduling capabilities created by ARC and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for missions such as the Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity), Phoenix Lander and the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. The JPL and ARC development teams have created an “Ensemble Suite” of software (plug-in tools), based off of the open source Ensemble Integrated Development Environment (IDE), that can be added to/removed from the core planning software. This allows new functions and capabilities to be added to Score so that it can be used to support other missions, such as NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO), Desert Research And Technology Studies (DRATS) and Pavilion Lake analog missions. Our team will be using Score to support the Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) by providing a visual representation of the highly complex, integrated multi-disciplinary science and exploration mission. The capabilities of Score will allow the team to easily identify relationships between the science and exploration teams and the impact of unexpected schedule delays while maintaining mission cognizance. Hope that was enough about Score to confuse all of you reading this blog entry! I am looking forward to sharing my team’s planning experiences during the upcoming Kelly Lake mission, and I hope you will share your experiences and comment on my posts.
- Lauren (aka. Engineeringirl)
The 2011 field season will be our fourth year using the DeepWorkers and I’d like to think that over the years we’ve learned a few things and have gotten pretty good at flight planning. In the last two field seasons at Pavilion Lake, we’ve been focused on collecting images from regions of the lake where we haven’t been before (filling in the gaps!) or on getting more detailed imaging based on cool features we’ve seen in video footage from previous years. This year the team is at Kelly Lake and we’re in a situation similar to the one we faced in 2008 when we first brought the DeepWorkers to Pavilion for the first time and were new at flight planning, where do we send them?
Unlike our previous two years at Pavilion Lake, at Kelly Lake we don’t have previous flights or underwater images to help guide us in our flight planning. This is exciting as it means everything is new and we don’t know what surprises might be in store for us when we first view the video, but it also means that we need to find some way to decide how to design our flight paths. While we don’t have prior flights what we do have is some really great sonar images that were acquired in 2010 using the AUV from the University of Delaware team. Using these images we can get some sense of where interesting features are in the lake (e.g. big field of microbialites, neat ripples in the sediment) and plan our flights to have the DeepWorkers pass them by.
Courtesy Art Trembanis Univ Delaware
Every year we try to improve on how we create the actual flight paths as we’re constantly learning about ways to make it easier and more efficient. Thanks to the wonderful IRG folks, we have some incredible online flight planning tools this year that we’ve been able to put to good use (including many attempts to break /fix/improve them along the way!). With them we’re able to draw our flight paths directly onto an image of the lake.With these new tools and the sonar images, we’ve already managed to plan all 14 of our DW flights putting us in great shape for final reviews and edits leading up to the field season which is only a little over a month away. We look forward to applying the lessons we’ve learned from flight planning at Pavilion to the exploration of Kelly Lake and can’t wait to see what interesting finds await us!
Your 2011 flight planners,
Allyson, Mars and Stan
DORA and UBC-Gavia in the water ready to deploy in Pavilion Lake.
Its now been just over a week since the end of our adventures at Pavilion Lake and, as I start trying to look at all the data we’ve collected, I can’t help but be impressed with our successes. In addition to the image mosaicing that I was working on, and showed pictures of in an earlier post, my specific focus of being up at the lake was running coordinated missions between the two autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), that we had on-site from the University of British Columbia and the University of Delaware, and the Deepworker vehicles. Our mission planning goals were twofold; joint objectives and joint missions.
Joint objective style missions measure parameters that are relatively static in time (i.e. photos of microbialites). This means that coordinating different platforms isn’t necessary but coordinating their datasets are. This requires that the timestamps of each data stream be precisely set and that the dataset is georeferenced to a high degree of accuracy. This work was started last year but continued this year by using the collected images from Deepworker and comparing it with AUV collected data (e.g. high-precision bathymetry).
Comparing multibeam bathymetry collected with DORA with detailed imagery from UBC-Gavia.
Joint missions involved a significantly greater degree of coordination as it involved running the vehicles at the same time as the Deepworkers. Our experiment this year was to look at the area of increased salinity at the bottom of the lake. To this end had the Deepworkers crossing the bottom of the basin at about 1 m from the bottom (> 55 m depth), while running UBC-Gavia at 40 m depth. The greatest debate was trying to decide what the minimum safe distance was to be between the two platforms! In the end we ran AUV missions down to 48 m without any problems. Although we’re just starting to process all of this data now, from both styles of missions, we’re excited about what new perspectives these combined datasets might hold.
-Alex
As I near the end of my doctoral studies, I reflect on how different my thesis is from what I actually started four years ago but at the same time how much things come full circle. My involvement began when I started using UBC-Gavia, an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, to map the bottom of the lake. Unfortunately, as a result of the slope steepness in this lake, we found it very hard to accomplish and so the focus of my thesis is on water temperature and physical transport. That said, I’ve maintained a soft spot for image mosaicing.
Gavia, the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)
Just recently, we have been working with people from the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (CCOM) and the University of Delaware to mosaic not only the images we have been collecting but also those Deepworker images. The first, and easier dataset to work with, was the flat sections in the middle of the lake which has been of interest due to the microbialite mats that have been observed there. These are easier to process as don’t have roll and pitch errors that are introduced. Below is just a very small sample of what the final product that can be generated.
Mosaic of images collected by UBC-Gavia of microbial mats from the central basin (length of image is about 10 m long).
In addition to running AUVs, I am also lucky enough to participate in PLRP by being a Deepworker pilot and I was able to have my first flight yesterday. After finishing my mission yesterday and completing all my objectives, I was told that I had a bit of extra time left over so I leaped at the opportunity at testing my new found mosaicing skills. As I was coming back to the barge, I passed by what people around here call ‘microbiliate roads’; long straight lines of microbialite that are aligned along the slope. Lining up the camera, I tried to film a long straight line up the slope. Although the mosaic still has some error resulting from vehicle pitch – you can see this in the image by the fact that it begins to ‘pinch’ out – but I was still pretty happy with the first attempt.
So now the next step is to refine the processing so that we can start using these images for our mission planning for both AUV and Deepworker flights. Part of doing this is to clean the images to remove the roll and pitch effects and then we can drape these images over the bathymetry data that we are collecting. This will allow us to start creating a georeferenced map of the photos.
- Alex
As the 2010 PLRP field season draws nearer, we are all busy with plans and preparations. This summer will be a bit different for me as our fearless leader Darlene will be on maternity leave and I will be stepping into the role of acting Principal Investigator (PI). A daunting task, but I know I have the support of an amazing team of people and we’re all working towards having a fun, safe and successful field season.
Allyson in final preparation for a DeepWorker flight
Looking back over the last 5 years that I have been involved in PLRP I am in awe of what we’ve accomplished and how much we’ve grown. Last year we successfully mapped additional regions of the lake using the DeepWorker submersibles and re-visited areas of interest identified in 2008 for more detailed imaging and observations. We were also very successful in classifying a great deal of our DW imaging data while in the field. This was a huge accomplishment and the entire team worked very hard to make this happen, we hope to have a repeat this year. Examination of the 2009 data has helped us to identify more regions that show interesting trends that we will be exploring in this upcoming field season.
Flight planning for 2010 is going ahead full-steam! We are very pleased to continue with our astronaut training program this year and welcome Chris Hadfield and the Stan Love to the PLRP gang. I can’t wait to see their reaction to viewing this remarkable lake and the microbialites for the first time.
As always, there are a number of fundamental science questions that we are working towards answering through the exploration of this beautiful lake, not only with DW but with SCUBA and GAVIA as well. We will continue to examine questions regarding the role of biology and physical parameters in carbonate precipitation including: What are the dominant surface microbial and viral communities? Does grazing by macroorganisms affect microbialite morphology? What is the role of algae? How do depth and slope affect morphology? And many more… I’m looking forward to partaking in some great science and exploration activities this summer.
The field season is nearly upon us so stay tuned for more updates!
~ Allyson
This morning the towers of downtown Vancouver, across Burrard Inlet from our hotel, were blurred with a grey veil of rain. No trouble, I thought. It rained yesterday and we got plenty of training done regardless. Rain is not really a threat to a submarine! But, crucially, the big rotating sign in the shape of a “Q” that marked the Lonsdale Quay marketplace was behaving oddly. Every once in a while its steady turning would stall, or even reverse for a few seconds.
The magnitude of the problem didn’t become apparent until we got out to the marine lab. The Canadian flag at the front of the building snapped madly and strained at its line. The sea was dark grey and spangled with whitecaps. Two-foot seas washed over the float where the support skiff was moored and interfered with each other near shore to make a high, sharp, chaotic chop. Sailboats in ones and twos, aborting cruise plans for the Easter weekend, struggled in the direction of the harbor under bare poles, pitching and plunging. Not a pretty day for nautical endeavors. (We found out later that it was the strongest windstorm in several years, with winds reaching 100 km/h. It dropped trees on power lines, cutting electricity to over 100,000 customers, and forced cancellation of some ferry service).
Our instructors didn’t like the look of things either. “Do you get seasick easily?” one of them asked me. Jeff was frowning at the idea of putting a sub under tow in the present sea state, if it should have a mechanical problem. For about an hour we stood around in our full raingear, watching the weather for signs of improvement. Our patience was not rewarded. If anything, it seemed to be getting worse–visibility dropping, sleet beginning to mix in with the rain. We began discussing how much submarine training we might be able to accomplish without having to court nausea and disaster by putting the vehicles in the water.
What we settled on was to call our sonar and manipulator work of the previous day sufficient and to devote our time today to the one system on the sub that we hadn’t touched yet: the video camera and recorder. It emerged that the video system works pretty much the same on land and in the water. Chris and I took turns sitting in DeepWorker #7, hatch closed to keep the rain out of the cockpit but resting securely on dry land, and working through the video controls. This was quickly done. Then we headed for the warmth and dryness of the lab for coffee and “Timbits” (evidently the Canadian word for donut holes). We had a relaxed discussion of all we’d learned. After that we exchanged a final round of thank-yous and handshakes, called our submarine driver certification complete, and parted company.
Thus ends Dr. Love’s underwater blog for now. It was a wonderful treat to drive the Deep Worker, and a much appreciated privilege to be allowed to do so, especially in the company of such excellent teachers and fellow students. For me this training trip was also a satisfying visit to the Pacific Coast. I was raised in Western Oregon, and any day when I get to see clouds caught in tall trees is a good one! The blog will resume this summer in a higher and less rainy environment, when I meet the DeepWorker submersible again for the Real Deal: the field season at Pavilion Lake.
-Stan
The second day of sub training for Chris Hadfield and myself started out cold, grey, and blustery. On the drive out to the Canadian government fisheries research lab where we were conducting our training, I could see a fresh dusting of snow on the trees not very far up the mountains north of Vancouver. It must have fallen overnight. At sea level there was only rain, but there was a strong breeze from the southeast just beginning to raise a small swell and a few whitecaps out on the bay.
The first half of the training day was a walkthrough of emergency procedures with instructor Jeff Heaton, in the warmth and comfort of a small upstairs conference room at the lab. Jeff jokingly refers to this part of training as the “we’re all gonna die” lecture. Like a spacecraft, a submarine is a totally enclosed micro-environment surrounded by conditions that won’t support human life. In either type of vehicle, the most serious situations are those that interfere with life support functions. It is these cases that drive the need for step-by-step checklists to follow when things go wrong.
The designers of the DeepWorker understood the risks of operating underwater and built a very safe vehicle. The sub has multiple independent sources of breathing gas, and even a way to use the pilot’s own lungpower to operate the carbon dioxide scrubbers if there should be a problem with the electrically-driven fans. The sub can return to the surface via any one of three different methods even after a total loss of its electric thrusters. The only hazard that can’t be solved through design is getting stuck or entangled so that the sub can’t get back to the surface. The pilot has to rely on his or her own good judgment to avid that scenario.
After lunch, Chris and I climbed into our trusty submarines for an afternoon of practical work. Fortunately the wind had calmed down and the sea state remained unchallenging. We moved away from the dock, and descended to the bottom of the bay. Jeff talked us through a few emergency drills, step by step. We tried swapping to backup electrical power, using a strap-on mask to breathe through the CO2 scrubbers with the fans powered off, switching to an alternate oxygen supply, ascending to the surface using only the compressed-air ballast tank, and reacting to an imaginary fire in the cockpit. All of those exercises went smoothly.
For the next phase of the lesson, Chris and I spent some time trying to locate two sonar targets out in the bay. The morning’s wave action had stirred up the sediment so that the visibility was even worse than the day before. Jeff would give us a bearing and range to the target, and we’d stare at our sonar screens and try to determine which smeary, shifting blob of color was the sonar target. This was quite tough. Twice we homed in on each other’s submarine without intending to. Chris found a piece of PVC pipe. I was stalking a promising sonar target when it suddenly materialized out of the green gloom a meter in front of me: a huge, dark, towering mass festooned with waving snaky growths. What the heck?! Something out of an H. P. Lovecraft story? No, just an old wooden piling covered with foot-long tube worms. OK, there was some of the sea life I had wanted to observe.
Leaving the piling, I did have some success (with a lot of help from the surface) finding the two sonar targets and using my robot arm to grab them, pick them up, and move them to new locations. It feels like quite an accomplishment to find anything in such low visibility.
By the time the day ended, I’d completed a three-hour dive and was feeling very comfortable in the sub. I felt like I had a good grasp of the systems, and could get the machine to do what I wanted without undue effort. It’s a pleasant feeling.
Tomorrow we expect another half day in the sub, after which we’ll be certified drivers, ready to ply the calm, clear waters of Pavilion Lake!
-Stan
Today was an exciting day in the world of space exploration! Here in Vancouver, it was day two of DeepWorker training with Chris and Stan, who searched through the murky waters of Burrard Inlet for sonar targets – but – halfway around the world, in Kazakhstan, the Russian space capsule Soyuz was preparing to blast off for the International Space Station with three astro/cosmonauts aboard! You can guess which event was more exciting to watch…
Soyuz blasts off in Kazakhstan (as viewed from the surface) - Photo: Scott Andrews/NASA
Deepworker in Action (as viewed from the surface) - Photo: Ben Cowie
After dinner in West Vancouver, we gathered around Chris’ laptop in the hotel to watch the Soyuz launch on NASA TV. American astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson (who is Chris’ neighbor in Houston!), was aboard with two Russian cosmonauts: Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Kornienko. Watching a human spaceflight with astronauts provides a very unique perspective about the procedures, nuances and stresses experienced during the flight. They could almost predict to the second when the booster rockets were to detach, when camera angles would switch, and when various communications with Moscow would occur – including a conversation with the Roscosmos presdient! Chris was also quick to point out the toy duck hanging above the pilot’s position that belongs to Alexander’s daughter. The duck acts as a gravity sensor, indicating when the vehicle has left Earth’s gravitational pull by floating away on its tether!
Tomorrow, Stan and Chris will become fully-certified as DeepWorker pilots, and I will depart from Vancouver. But, I will be back soon – the field season countdown clock is T-minus 122,942 minutes and counting!
- Ben
