On the way back from Kelly Lake, we swung by Pavilion Lake to take some shots of the live sub operations underway. This is a very beautiful part of the world.

Next year the team will be diving into a lake called Kelly Lake, and potentially Pavilion Lake at the same time.  This creates a challenge for the communications team.  Both sites must have broadband access to the Space Network Research Federation (SNRF) and the Internet, and be able to communicate from site to site at all times.

Satellite connectivity is great, but in this environment the “terrain mask” (steep rise of the terrain all around us) makes it difficult to hit a satcom “bird” in the sky from these high northern latitudes.  On top of this, satellite transponder time can be expensive (especially considering the amount of “megahertz” or transponder we need!), and adds a significant “latency” to the communications link (in both directions) because the satellites are orbiting so far above the Earth.  This latency can cause problems for some of the operations conducted by this team, and terrestrial interfaces tend to have very low latency.

We took a Trackstick with us in the helicopter, and you can see the path we flew here (thanks to Google Earth!)

So we took off in a helicopter in Lillooet, and flew to Kelly Lake to visit and survey the terrestrial (ground/mountain-based) communications options for communications near the lake.  If we can avoid using a satcom link, we’ll have greater bandwidth and network performance at the 2011 test operations.

We found several options for connectivity or relay on a few mountains surrounding Kelly Lake, and even some options to link the two lakes together for next year’s mission.  This begins a year’s worth of planning “now”.  ; )

- Marc

Pavilion Lake, looking south

One of the DeepWorker chase boats, looking south.

The PLRP 2010 field season has come to a close and I am both saddened by the fact that operations are finished for another year but excited by the prospect of adding the data we’ve collected this year to our growing body of knowledge about this unique lake. I am in awe of the work that has been done by this amazing team and of how much we’ve grown, while maintaining the sense of adventure and camaraderie that to me, helps to define the PLRP.

We’ve taken great strides towards answering many of our research questions and in the process, with every answer we have come up with many more questions that will keep the PLRP team occupied for quite some time. Fortunately, our family continues to grow and every year we welcome new individuals who bring a unique perspective and desire to tease out the mysteries Pavilion has to offer. We have also been blessed this year by the addition of two little members to the PLRP family, Darlene Lim’s daughter Amelia and Greg Slater’s son Joseph. We look forward to the day when they are exploring the lake alongside us.

DeepWorker Pilots and Nuytco Team: 2010

The PLRP provides a wealth of research opportunities, and not just those focused on understanding the processes leading to the formation of the structures at Pavilion Lake but also to understanding fundamental biological, chemical and physical processes. The research contributions from our participating scientists and graduate students have resulted in a number of recent publications and are essential to increasing our understanding of Earth and astrobiological systems. We’re very proud of the role that the PLRP has played in developing operational technologies and protocols that not only help us meet our science objectives but provide important input into future space science missions.

With the addition of our two newest scientist pilots, astronauts Chris Hadfield and Stan Love, we had 34 DeepWorker missions over 10 days of operations. This year we were aided greatly in our pre-season flight planning by the wonderful team from NASA Ames led by Matt Deans and David Lees who developed an amazing flight planning tool that enabled us to search images and flight paths from previous years while building flight plans in Google Earth. Flights this year were planned to collect images of the remaining unexplored regions of the lake, to record detailed images of areas of interest identified from 2008 and 2009 data and to use the submersibles in combination with other analytical tools such as a conductivity, temperature and depth (CTD) instrument and our autonomous underwater vehicle(s) (AUV). Our ability to review post-flight video data in the field, an effort pioneered in 2009, added greatly to our productivity as this information was used immediately by the science backroom team to modify existing flight plans to best optimize our data collection. As part of the daily flight debriefs, we have also continued to apply metrics associated with scientific productivity to understand factors that influence scientific exploration. New this year to the DeepWorker flight repertoire were long ~ 5 hour flights and two night flights to investigate the grazing activity that we suspect may occur in the lake. To add to the innovations this year, Nick Wilkinson designed a fantastic, interactive program for use in classifying the microbialite images. This new tool will allow us to efficiently organize and process our field data over the coming months. Stay tuned for updates.

The Amazing Pavilion Lake Research Project Team: 2010!

In case our DeepWorker operations didn’t keep us busy enough, we had a number of other important activities included in the field schedule this year. The UBC and University of Delaware AUV teams produced fantastic images of the lake bottom that were often used to compliment the DeepWorker flights and give us a better picture of where interesting structures and features are in the lake. Numerous SCUBA dives were performed by our intrepid team of divers to collect water and microbialite samples that were shared between various research groups in an effort to combine and compliment analytical findings. These samples will be characterized from a virology, microbial lipid, isotopic and genetic point of view to provide more information about the role of biology in the formation of the microbialites and what biosignatures may be left behind. Water samples were collected from nearby lakes including Crown, Turquoise, Pear and Kelly Lake to continue to help us put Pavilion Lake in context. Kelly Lake, which also hosts microbialites and has been an area of interest to the PLRP team for many years, was also the focus of significant AUV activities this year. Microbial mats were once again collected from the Cariboo Plateau lakes and giant pancakes were eaten by all (well, almost all). As a new participatory activity this year, our visiting teacherswere given the task of selecting a SCUBA dive based on their understanding of the research questions of interest (on their first day no less!). I’m happy to report that they eagerly interviewed members of the team before presenting their selected dive and rationale to the group for inclusion in the next day’s diving schedule. Community Day was another great success this year with the team happy to show off our work and answer questions from the many visitors we had to the site. Busy indeed!

We plan on continuing our updates throughout the year as we analyze samples and work through the amazing amount of data that were collected. Thanks to all who have read about our activities and through this process, have joined in our adventure. See you next year!

~ Allyson

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

What a week it has been!  Today is the last of my six full days here at Pavilion Lake, and it feels like we’ve done a month’s worth of work.  Days begin with breakfast at 7 am and a team meeting at 7:30, and conclude with science debriefs that often end at 10 or 11 pm.  The pace is not quite as fast and relentless as a Shuttle flight…but it’s close.  It’s one more way in which Pavilion Lake is a good analog for an actual space flight.  (Differences include the excellent food and, on the rare occasions when time permits, being able to go fo a long jog with fresh air and lovely mountain scenery!)

Stan preparing for flight in DeepWorker

With two more “flights” in the Deepworker submarine under my belt since last I wrote, I’ve gotten a lot more familiar with the machine.  Although the miniature submarine looks nothing like a space suit, there are a lot of similarities.  And someday, when humans visit near-Earth asteroids or other objects with very low surface gravity, I expect they’ll do their spacewalks in something that looks a lot more like a Deepworker than a traditional person-shaped space suit. Here’s why.  A small asteroid has such weak gravity that even the slightest nudge with a hand or foot would send a spacewalking astronaut soaring high above the surface, and it might take hours to come back down.  A stronger shove might send an astronaut away at a speed higher than the escape velocity, in which case gravity would not bring them back ever!  Not so good.  On the International Space Station, which of course has no noticeable gravity of its own, astronauts keep from floating away by holding on to special handrails.  Asteroid do not come equipped with handrails.  They do have rough surfaces which might provide hand- and foot-holds, but unfortunately most asteroids are not solid blocks of material.  Instead they are “rubble piles,” flying clumps of sand, gravel, and boulders held together not by material strength, but by their own weak self-gravity.  So if you were moving hand-over-hand across the surface of the asteroid and accidentally pushed yourself off on a suborbital trajectory, you could grab onto a rock to keep yourself down–and the rock would simply come away with you! The practical result is that hands and feet are probably not the best way to move around an asteroid.  Better might be a suit with tiny thrusters that you could use to maneuver yourself around the landscape.  But if you’re not using your hands and feet to move around like a person climbing a tree, there’s no need to enclose them in a flexible suit.  Instead, you could keep them inside a hard pressure shell where they could be used to control thrusters, manipulators, and onboard systems.  Such an arrangement might look a lot like a Deepworker.  As a side benefit, the operator might be a bit more comfortable than in a traditional space suit.

Stan and DeepWorker 7.

Our underwater work here at Pavilion Lake ends this afternoon.  I’ll be the pilot for one of the last two “flights.”  The flight planner, Dr. “Mars” Marinova (who was just recently awarded her Ph.D. from the Geological and Planetary Sciences division at Caltech, where I worked as a postdoc more years ago than I care to admit), set up an especially interesting flight plan for me.  I’ll visit one of the “deep mounds,” outcroppings of microbialites growing on isolated boulders on the otherwise rather flat and monotonous central floor of the lake.  Then I’ll head off to do some vertical transects along the western shore.  These transects begin in deep water, then move upslope through the depth zone where the microbialite population is richest.  As I fly the transects I’ll record video of what I see from the submarine, and keep a running monologue (also recorded on board) of my observations.  It should be a lot of fun…and I’m sure I’ll miss piloting the submarines when the field season ends.
This wraps up Dr. Love’s Underwater Blog.  If I’m fortunate enough to be able to participate here next field season and spend more quality time underwater, I’ll be sure to reactivate the blog.
-Stan

Transmission electron micrograph of viruses and bacteria. A, b, and c depict myoviruses, podoviruses, and siphoviruses respectively. Courtesy of Suttle, 2005.

Viruses are Earth’s smallest inhabitants, but they are also her most abundant. Scientists estimate that the Earth houses about 1 x 10^³⁰ viruses compared with just 6 x 10^⁹ (six billion) humans. A typical teaspoon-full of seawater (or Pavilion Lake water) contains between 10,000 and 100,000 viruses! If you all lined up all the viruses on Earth end to end, they would stretch for 10 million light years. Fortunately for us, the overwhelming majority of viruses are predators of micro-organisms, like bacteria and single-celled algae, and can not infect humans.

Viruses are tiny packets of nucleic acid wrapped in protein shell. They are reliant upon a host cell for their replication and gene expression and are as diverse structurally and genetically as they are abundant. Viruses vary in size from 20 to 600 nanometers in diameter and display a variety of shapes from thin filaments to round blobs to tiny lunar landing ships. Unique among all other life forms, viral genomes can be composed of single or doubled-stranded DNA or RNA.

The arrows point to viruses. Courtesy of Weinbauer, 2004.

Viral genomes are an incredibly source of genetic diversity. Between 60-90% of viral genes are new to science. In other words, these genes have no similarity to bacterial or eukaryotic genes that we have already investigated. Surprisingly, viruses are an essential part of healthy ecosystems. Every day they infect and kill about 20% of the micro-organsims in the ocean, impacting microbial community structure and function as well as releasing nutrients for surviving bacteria to feast upon. Viruses can also move genes between host cells via the process of transduction, making them agents of genetic evolution.

At Pavilion Lake, we are sampling microbialites (Fig. 2 & 3) and filtering large volumes of water (100 liters) to discover if and how viral diversity varies with depth and microbialite morphology. This year we are also working on new project, MARSLIFE, aimed at detecting nucleic acids in micro-volumes of samples (0.25 grams) while in the field from both microbialites and water samples. This directly mirrors how we might search for life on Mars – by looking for DNA in minute amounts of rock or ice. Because viruses likely evolved on the early Earth, studying the viruses of Pavilion Lake provides insight into what life in ancient microbialites and shallow seas might have been like. In the process, we gain a better understanding of not only our planet, but also what other bizarre and unique organisms the universe might be hiding.

Diver bringing a microbialite collected from a depth of 85ft to the surface of Pavilion Lake.

Jan Finke filtering and concentrating viruses from Pavilion Lake water.

Bonjour tout le monde,

Je m’appelle Claudine (ou Poutine si vous voulez) et j’ai la chance de participer au PLRP cette année en tant que membre de l’équipe de UBC-Gavia. Je viens de terminer mes études de 1er cycle en génie des eaux à l’Université Laval, à Québec, et je fais présentement un stage à l’Université de British Columbia sous la supervision de Dr.Bernard Laval.

Notre équipe a donc le mandat de faire fonctionner le AUV (Autonomus Underwater Vehicle) Gavia-UBC et de récolter un maximum de données. Gavia-UBC est principalement équipé d’un CTD (Conductivité, Température, Profondeur), d’un scatteringmeter (chlorophylle, CDOM, Turbidité). Il y a donc beaucoup de données à traiter, ce qui occupe mon temps entre deux réparations de notre véhicule. En effet, notre AUV a éprouvé quelques difficultés depuis notre arrivée à PLRP mais, grâce entre autre à l’équipe du l’Université du Delaware qui nous prête gentiment certaines parties de leur AUV et aux nombreux efforts de l’équipe, nous avons réussi à le faire fonctionner convenablement.

Au moment d’écrire ces lignes, notre UBC-Gavia effectue une mission qui a pour but de couvrir une grande partie du bassin central du Lac Pavilion, à une profondeur constante de 40m. Cette mission dure environ 1h20min et devrait nous apporter de nombreuse données de conductivité que mon équipe traitera avec les logiciels MatLab et Fledermaus. On va encore aller se coucher vers 23h30-minuit, mais cela ne m’empêche pas de participer au club de course de 6h00am! Quel belle expérience à PLRP!

- Claudine Fortier

Claudine et Gavia-UBC

Hello from Pavilion Lake and happy Canada Day!! My name is Mary Beth and I am one of the more junior members of the PLRP team. I am half way through my undergrad at Cornell University in New York and am an intern at NASA Ames Research Center in California.

I just arrived back to land a half hour ago after being out on the lake for over 6 hours! And while it was a lot of fun to be outside, I had to pull out my jacket that I only use during the winter in New York. It has been a very busy day as the PLRP team conducts a full suite of submersible, autonomous underwater vehicle, and SCUBA dive operations.

I had two major jobs today. The first was keeping a log of all of the science notes that sub pilots called up to the surface while following the sub in a boat that is equipped with walkie-talkies capable of communicating with the pilot while he was underwater. Astronaut Mike Gernhardt was piloting one of the subs today, conducting an extended 5 hour dive around the south basin. It was exciting to listen to all of Mike’s observations and discoveries in real time!

My second job today was taking rock samples for my own summer research project. I am investigating the role of rocks in the formation and morphology of microbialites. We think that microorganisms may prefer to start forming microbialites on solid surface substrates, like rocks, and our team has observed many microbialites throughout the lake that have formed on top of both really big and small rocks. Pilot Margarita imaged rock slides of interests in the DeepWorker subs on Monday, and after reviewing the data with the science team, we decided to revisit a few of these slides with divers to collect rocks to study. So, today I had pro divers Mike D. and Gary take a few rock samples every 10 ft. from a rock slide in the central basin that went from about 80 feet below the surface all the way up to the shore.

After collecting these samples, I will analyze them in our outdoor wet lab, recording basic physical observations and measurements, and looking for trends in the data that will help us understand how factors like size of the rock and depth may affect microbialite growth. Hopefully my observations will help elucidate factors that control microbialite growth on rocks and even give us more clues to how microbialites are first formed.

-MB

Ahhhh, Hawaii. The Big Island. Palm trees, tropical ocean, coconuts, yummy coffee – you can’t beat a tropical field destination! Of course, when Allyson and I arrived at the site, this is what we saw…

ISRU Base Camp

Where are all the beaches and palm trees! Can you guess where we are on the Big Island? I’ll give you a few hints. It is quite chilly. We are quite close to the stars. How about this one: we are on the tallest mountain in the world if you measure from the seafloor! If you guessed Mauna Kea, you are correct!

The ISRU field site sits in a crater at about 9000 feet above sea level on the slopes of the extinct volcano Mauna Kea. The site was chosen because of the cold, dusty conditions and the presence of volcanics that are similar in many ways to what exists on the Moon. Working at a high elevation and on the slopes of a mountain can be pretty tough – plenty of wind, occasional dust storms, lots of fog, and the threat of altitude sickness or overexertion. In truth, however, it is also a beautiful place to work. Mauna Kea offers lovely views, interesting volcanic rocks, and the thrill of spending time on such a large and powerful mountain. In fact, Mauna Kea is considered a very spiritually powerful place to the native Hawaiians – you can check out a brief introduction to that history here: http://www.imiloahawaii.org/59/maunakea.

Hawaii... a fine place to do research in February! (Photo: Bekah Shepard)

Base camp is a small tent city. We have a mess tent (yum – lunch!), a medical tent, an administration tent, tents for the scientists, tents for the engineers, and tents that function as garages for the instruments and robotics that are being tested. Allyson and I settled into one of the science tents, but didn’t stay inside too long! Right away, we set about following the various science and engineering teams in their testing activities. Details about what we found to come!

- Bekah

Aloha! That’s right – PLRP is visiting Hawaii! To be more specific, Allyson and myself have journeyed to the Big Island to take part in another exploration analogue test – the In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Test. ISRU is just a fancy way of saying “using the resources that are in place”, but in this case, we mean resources that are “in place” on the Moon or Mars. Some of the major goals of planetary exploration are sample return (bringing samples from other planets to Earth) and human exploration. Both of these ventures will require lots of fuel, and in the case of human exploration, plenty of oxygen and water. To send enough of these resources to the Moon or another planet would be incredibly expensive, and might even take several trips! Therefore, learning to use resources “in place” to generate fuel, oxygen, and water will be a great help to planetary exploration!

“But what are you Pavilion Lake researchers doing at an ISRU field test?” I hear you cry. It is true that our main focus at Pavilion Lake is the scientific exploration of the lake and its microbialites. However, as our project has grown and the exploration has become more complicated (submersibles, AUV’s, complicated communications, LOTS of people working to support the science) we realized that it can sometimes be challenging to keep the science as the top priority! In our struggles to do science as effectively and successfully as we can, we realized that developing metrics (tools for evaluating how successful we are at doing research) was surprisingly helpful!

Our tent at ISRU-Hawaii. Yes, this really is Hawaii.

We have since gone on to collaborate with folks developing the next generation Lunar Rover, and have applied our metrics to their Desert RATs analogue test site in Arizona. (Check out the NASA analogue site for more information about RATs: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/analogs/). That collaboration has continued, and when the opportunity arose to test our metrics in yet another analogue setting, we jumped at the chance! Why? The balance between science, engineering, and operations in different in each of these analogue field tests, and that difference helps us to hone our metrics. We are gaining a better and better understanding of how science functions in each of these types of analogues, and that helps us all to become better exploration scientists.

Stay tuned for next time when Allyson and Bekah say “Hey! This is Hawaii! Where are all the beaches and palm trees!?!

- Bekah

This is a question that we ask our students on the first day of school in September. Boy, we have some interesting things to share on our first day of school. This summer, we travelled together to the Pavilion Lake Research Project to learn about the science that is being done here and how it can be incorporated into the classroom. During the year Bree and I are both immersed in the classroom, and most of the time we are teaching science. Today we have found ourselves writing a blog which neither of us have done before. We seem to be entertaining the people around us with our different ideas of how best to compose one of these, and we will find out if we get a gold star later. The crew here have been very welcoming and happy to share about what they do here. In fact, our first night here we were allowed to get inside one of the DeepWorker submersibles which are used during the scientist flight missions (we were still on dry land, but still very cool). Part of us being here at Pavilion Lake was to integrate teachers into the different activities that go on here, and integrate us they did.

From left, Bree Riddell, Ricky Arnold and Jen Stonehouse

So we are sure you are wondering what we were were able to do at the lake. Unfortunately we were not allowed to drive the subs but we had many other cool opportunities to be part of the team. We sat in on science meetings, pilot meetings, classified data from the submersibles, talked to scientists and astronauts, observed the launches of the submersibles and helped record data from the flights as a science stenographer. One of things that we did was classify the images returned from the underwater flights. During the flights images of what the pilots see is recorded on camera. The pilots see very cool things when on their mission – microbialites. After the mission this data then has to be classified. We looked at images to identified what was in the image – microbialites, algae, rocks, sediment, trash – oh my! This is something that can easily be transferred to the classroom. We classify every day just like the scientists (just on a different level). As the team here classifies these images for science and further understanding, students can also classify these images in the process of learning how to do science. Trust us (or read the rest of these blogs if you don’t), microbialites are very interesting!

How did we do with our first blog? Did we get a gold star?

-Jen and Bree