I heard about Clinton and its popular lakes, Pavillion and Kelly, only a few months ago when I approached Dr. Greg Slater about beginning a Masters project under his supervision at McMaster University.  Little did I know my interest in geochemistry and astrobiology would lead to a wonderful experience in a small town across the country.  When I was offered the opportunity to come to BC to see the field site for myself, collect my own samples, and meet the rest of the Pavillion Lake Research Project (PLRP) team, I was ecstatic.  Most Masters students aren’t fortunate enough to do all this before they even start their project!

My research over the next couple years will involve identifying a potential biosignature associated with the precipitated carbonate that makes up the microbialites in Kelly Lake.  Biosignatures are mineral, organic, or isotopic characteristics that are unequivocal evidence of life. Microbial biosignatures have been found in similar systems such as Pavillion Lake, and so I’m interested in understanding how these compare to biosignatures that are hypothesized to exist in the Kelly Lake microbialites. The results of this research may have implications in the use of biosignatures in the search for extra-terrestrial life.

When I arrived in Clinton, I had no idea that such a small community would show so much support for the PLRP and be so genuinely interested in our research.  Our community day on July 23^rd had an exceptional turn out and exemplified the desire of the community to be a part of what we are doing.  Tours were given through the Mobile Mission Control Center (MMCC) during the day, where the Science Backroom Team, CapCom, and the Flight Director communicated with one of the deep submersibles while watching a live feed of their underwater mission.  I couldn’t believe the number of people who were waiting anxiously to see inside this NASA trailer that was parked by the Cariboo Lodge all week.  Later in the day, BC Parks hosted a gathering down by Kelly Lake to celebrate their 100^th Anniversary and their collaboration with the PLRP.  The Minister of the Environment, Terry Lake, made and appearance and everyone seemed to have a great time. Check out the community day photos here.

I would like to thank the Clinton community once more for being such gracious hosts as our large research team overran their town and studied their lakes.  Talking to everyone about this project has made me really excited to start my research in September and has given me a much better perspective on the overall project.  My experience here has been invaluable and I hope to return one day in the future!

By: Sarah Soles

Curtis Suttle Sharing his MARSLIFE research

Nicky and I were afforded the unique professional development opportunity to participate in real-time, field-based, multidisciplinary science. The Pavilion Lake Research Project, which developed from an interest to map and explore the distribution of fresh-water microbialites in Pavilion Lake. Each year the project has expended and for 2011 has moved to a new site – Kelly Lake. Kelly Lake is a few kilometers from the village of Clinton in Gold Trail School District. Both Nicky and I work within this district as public school teachers. Currently, Nicky teaches at the elementary level in Cache Creek and I teach at the secondary level in Clinton.

We were both ecstatic about being selected as the exclusive two teacher-participants this year. With some trepidation, we arrived on site at the Cariboo Lodge base camp on our first day at 3:00 pm, not sure what to expect. We met the education outreach coordinator, Jennifer Stonehouse, and were immediately put at ease. Our two and a half day schedule was jammed-packed and, busy; full of a variety of informative sessions with different team leaders, researchers and engineers. We were awed at the extent of the expertise, the scope of the project, and the willingness of participants to share with us.

Highlights include:

• Learning about the communication network that was established for the large amount of data that was gathered.
• Being right there with the DeepWorkers on the barge and observing the launch, and collection of data (voice, stills, and video information).
• Conversation with NASA astronaut, Mike Gernhardt Meeting many incredible and welcoming NASA and CSA personnel.

Microbialites with Tyler

It was a much more casual and informal environment than what we had anticipated. We soon realized that patience and adaptability were valuable character attributes that all participants possessed. Besides the obvious science and technology applications of this analogous MARSLIFE site, we learned a lot about scientific collaboration and collegial interactions. The evening roundtable discussions with all science teams represented were absolutely illuminative to the true nature of the scientific process, often generating more questions than answers, initiating cross-disciplinary connections, and exciting pure, animated passions for science. Even the inclement weather did not dampen the spirits of those attending. It was an intense, personable, and inspiring experience, in which both Nicky and I feel so fortunate to have been included.

Written by: Gloria Mertens and Nicky Patterson

Teachers getting the inside scoop on DeepWorker

Just down the canyon and a little to the side, from Pavilion Lake to Kelly Lake – Welcome! Another year has flown by and I find myself heading east again to see some of the crew that I have had the pleasure to kick out of the kitchen over the past 5 years, and meet some new friends as well. This year I do not have a blue Volkswagon Vanagon or orange Westfalia jammed to the roof with food for the team. I am somewhat pleased with not having to drag a weighed down VW on a long road trip and am impressed with the minimal equipment necessary for my new position as the EPO coordinator. In less than 24 hours, simply myself and my mac-apple-mac laptop (and road bike of course) will step off the plane and into the 2011 field season.

When Darlene Lim offered me the EPO position my first instinct was “ I do sport nutrition, not twitter – no thanks.” Always up for the learning opportunities of a new challenge I accepted the position and have been mostly thrilled ever since.  Now I can’t wait to continue to share the amazing science and exploration activities of 2011 with you. This field season will be full of great discoveries, and will highlight some of the best space science and exploration activities that happen on Earth!

Not only have we expanded to a new location and new community, but we welcome some talented new folks: The JSC Timeliners/Robotics group, Liza Coe from NASA-Ames and Sean Maday from Google.Check their bio’s out here.

Jessica Parsons from JSC, Raffy Pendery from Studio98 and I will be working hard to keep you updated from the field – with blogs like this one, tweets, facebook posts, photos and videos from the team’s daily science and exploration activities. We welcome questions about our research through any of these channels, and will endeavor to answer questions from you as soon as we can! You can also submit questions to Henry Bortman through Astrobiology Magazine.

Stay tuned for some great media coverage by BC Magazine, Discovery’s Daily Planet Series, New York Times, Earth Periodical and much more. Thanks for your interest in our project, and welcome back to the Pavilion Lake Research Project at Kelly Lake.

Once I land in field camp I will update on the DeepWorker arrival, barge set up and the first DW flight of 2011. Keep checking in.

I’m really excited about the PLRP 2011 field season because this year, anyone with an internet connection will be able to contribute directly to the scientific outcome of the project. By signing up to become a member of the PLRP Remote Science Team through MAPPER, a new web-based interface for exploring the lake bottom, you’ll be working with our project scientists to categorize and map the quantity, distribution and types of various features found in the lake. Generating this kind of ‘feature map’ for Pavilion and Kelly Lake is important since it can help scientists figure out where life may have one existed on Mars and in other parts of the solar system a long time ago. In a sense, by helping to explore the lakes of British Columbia, you’re helping scientists search for signs of life in space. I think that’s pretty cool.

Categorizing and mapping the lake bottom in detail is a big job — PLRP has systematically generated 100′s of thousands of images of the bottom of Pavilion Lake (and soon, Kelly Lake), and each one must be looked at and categorized by hand to identify each feature and its physical properties. Since these images are all geo-referenced, each one can be pinned to specific geographic location to complete the ‘feature map’ for each lake. As you can well imagine, going through 100′s of thousands of photos one-by-one takes a really long time. In fact, if you printed them all out, the stack of photos would be ‘deeper’ than Pavilion Lake!

Many hands make light work, as the saying goes. The idea behind MAPPER is that if a lot of people contribute just a little bit of time to tagging the PLRP photoset, the job will get done a lot more quickly. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to get anyone who’s interested in PLRP, science, or space exploration directly involved in the outcome of the project.

More details about MAPPER will be posted in the coming weeks, so please stay tuned for more announcements. You’ll be able to check out MAPPER at www.getmapper.com once the system’s fully up and running.

In the meantime, I’m busy adding new features and polish to the software that powers MAPPER. In fact, I just had a great trial run of MAPPER’s photo tagging system with Bree Mireau’s students at Riverside Secondary School in Port Coquitlam, BC. Bree gave the students an introduction to the PLRP and analogue activities in general, then I gave a quick introduction to MAPPER. Bree also put together a great fill-in-the-blank definitions sheet of the different substratum types found in the lake for the students to fill out, highlighting some fun educational opportunities to integrate MAPPER into the classroom.

The students then got their hands on MAPPER, which was loaded up with a trial photoset from the PLRP 2010 season. Over a 25 minute period, 3,500 classifications were submitted by 20 student groups. The students were all working concurrently on different chunks of the same photoset, which considerably sped up the whole process versus how we’ve been doing this in the past.

On average, DeepWorker sub flights during the 2008-2010 seasons generated around 1,000 to 2,000 images each. This means that we can expect to classify more than 2 flights’ worth of images (with about 20 remote classifiers working concurrently) in just 30 minutes. Of course, with more remote scientists we could get this done even faster. This is a big step in the right direction!

Efficiencies aside, I think it’s wonderful that these students were able to contribute data to a real-world NASA and CSA-funded mission of exploration as full-fledged remote scientists. In a few weeks, everyone will have the very same opportunity.

Finally, a big thanks to Bree and her students at Riverside Secondary for putting yesterday’s activities together!

Nick Wilkinson, MAPPER developer
Rask Systems Inc

We have moved… but only down the road. The 2011 PLRP field camp has moved locations to explore our analog research potential even further. This season, fieldwork will take place at Kelly Lake near the small town of Clinton, British Columbia. The PLRP 2011 Education and Public Outreach initiatives will be lead by Dana Lis, (PLRP former camp cook and Canadian Sport Dietitian), British Columbia teachers; Jennifer Stonehouse, Bree Mireau and Leanne Shortridge and Studio98’s renowned website and design expert Rafferty Pendery. As a team we are excited to build from EPO initiatives from past seasons and expand the education component to reach other schools, teachers and space education programs. We are very excited to share the ever-evolving science, learning and education from Pavilion Lake to Kelly Lake and beyond.

This season the education team is holding the first ever, professional development program (Pro-D). Twelve teachers from various areas of BC will be joining Bree, Leanne and Jenn for a 2.5-day workshop to discover innovative tools and techniques for bringing Mars Life to the classroom. This Pro-D will truly be a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring analog research to the students by giving them access to the same hands on tools and technology that NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronauts use.

We are looking forward to Discovery’s Daily Planet potentially filming a second episode about the PLRP. So far the discussion surrounding the story line for this episode focuses on the thrilling new tools and technologies that will be integrated into PLRP and the Kelly Lake field location. The new technologies include the SCORE program for mission planning and life feed video streaming from the subs. Keep an eye out for the upcoming video blogs in which scientists, the IRG team and the SCORE team from NASA-Ames and JSC will discuss the technologies that they bring to the project and how they are also used in planning space missions. Keep an eye out for Henry Bortmans’s special features on PLRP in Astrobiology magazine, the Vancouver Sun, twitter, Facebook and live video feed right here on www.pavilionlake.com.  The field season runs from July 16th – July 25th but the team has already been hard at work since last summer designing the new tools, flight plans and logistics for the 2011 season.

Rocks, rocks everywhere! This time we are not in the underwater wonder of Pavilion Lake, but in the desert and volcanic fields between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

But wait! Is that a rover peaking from behind that volcano?

Exploring these volcanic fields are rovers, habitats, robots small and big – all part of the NASA Desert RATS project. The goal: test equipment and procedures for planetary exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond. It’s an amazing operation where crews in rovers explore the surface, bring samples back to the habitat to be examined, robots small and big map the surroundings, and science crews back on “Earth” follow and coordinate it all. What does that add up to? Over 150 people learning about operations, science, engineering, and human factors to help us plan our next big exploration and science adventure in space!

At the start of the mission, the rover is docked to the habitat. For the following 7-day mission, the crew will explore and live in the rover. (Image: D. Reid)

This week I am part of the Strategic Science Operations Team (SSOT), which is the NASA way of saying “look at the day’s science, how does it all fit into understanding the area’s geology, and decide what should be studied the next day!” Our day starts after everyone else is done, at 8pm, since we need the data from the rover crews, the reports from the command center, and the reports of the day-time science team. Starting at 8pm, we put all of this information together to really understand what new discoveries were made during the day. My role is specifically to analyze the data from Rover A: looking at video notes, images and samples that the crew took, as well as notes and GigaPan images by the day-time science team.

The portable "Houston" in the Arizona Desert. This is the command center for the Desert RATS project. (Image: D. Reid)

It’s amazing to see the close-up images that the crew takes, and just how much more you can see and understand from walking across the area compared to orbital images! It’s like seeing a picture of New York or Paris, compared to actually going there! The crew can really give us a better perspective on what it is they see, and their interpretations of the geology are invaluable!
By 5am we have to finish our analysis, the planning for the following day, the new day plans for the crew – and uploaded it all to the command center.

At base camp, seeing all the pieces come together, I stand in awe. This is what it means to plan for a monumental mission like exploring the Moon. There are so many pieces, and they all have to come together flawlessly. A robot purrs to life as it starts moving up the hill to provide better communications. The crew is getting ready for another day of exploration, reading their updated day plans sent from the science team during the night. The day-time science team is ready and counting down the minutes to the morning brief with the crew. In the quietness of the desert, everyone is ready to go, and the sun comes up as if to give the go-ahead for another day of exploration.

~ mars.

It is the middle of night and our team is busy reviewing the samples collected yesterday and planning the next few days traverses. The results of the work are going great! Today our teams traversed the vc1 cone collecting many samples of  high quality with full communications.  Tomorrow starts twice a day comms for the final few days.  What a great experience!!

Learn about the PLRP’s operations, and tour the field site with Heather and Ben!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stephanie Nebel and Jonathan Gutsche answer an important distinction between two very different underwater vehicles! To ask your question, visit www.astrobio.net and search for the Pavilion Lake Research Project, or click this link: www.tinyurl.com/askplrp.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Damien McCombs answers questions about his job as PLRP First Aid Attendant. To ask your question, visit www.astrobio.net and search for the Pavilion Lake Research Project, or click this link: www.tinyurl.com/askplrp.

Click here to view the embedded video.