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.

When Dana Lis, our PLRP Education and Public Outreach coordinator, asked me to write a blog about how I was feeling, the first word that popped into my mind was – EXCITED! After months of planning, testing and organizing we are finally ready to start our adventure, and I am so looking forward to it all.

We now have nearly 200 participants on the PLRP team, and each year thousands of work hours go into preparing for our DeepWorker Science and Exploration (DSE) field deployment. Planning starts pretty much as soon as we end the prior year’s field program. This year’s deployment at Kelly Lake is no exception.

What’s in store is our most ambitious and operationally complex field program yet.

Throughout this coming week’s activities, we will continue our scientific exploration of microbialite rich lakes using such exploration tools as DeepWorker single-person submersibles and SCUBA diving. This research builds upon the work we have been conducting at Pavilion Lake, which is about an hour’s drive away. However, the team’s research doesn’t stop there. Our DSE program requires the integration of scientific methods, and operational and technological advancements. From these real field science activities, NASA scientists are learning about what it takes to conduct safe, productive and discovery-based science in extreme environments. It is this knowledge that will form the basis of future exploration concepts for human research voyages to such destinations as Near Earth Objects (NEOs) and Mars. With the end of the Shuttle program, this and other analog programs, such as Desert RATS and NEEMO, truly becomes NASA’s bridge to future space flight.

The entire PLRP is personal passion, so it is not surprising that I am extremely excited to get our 2011 field program underway.  But beyond the research, I’m excited to see the incredible scientists, engineers, operations experts, astronauts, and teachers who have become part of the PLRP family.  I’m thrilled to meet new colleagues who join us for the first time this year, and to thank the Clinton and Kelly Lake community for all of the support and assistance that they have already provided to the PLRP.

I remember when I was a kid that if something got me really excited I would jump up and down with joy.  Well, you know how it is, you kinda have to park that behavior through Junior high and high school, so I did.  But I find myself rekindling that jumping behavior these days each time I hear about some new finding or technical development or outreach opportunity that the PLRP team members come up with.  Happily, my NASA colleagues seem ok with me bouncing up and down periodically.  It is a joy, it is a privilege, to be part of the PLRP family.  And I hope that everyone reading our blogs will feel like they are part of the adventure too. 

Author: Rick White

Anyone still wondering what the “M.A.R.S” in MARSLIFE really stands for?

Here’s the ANSWER: Mars Analogue Research: Signatures of Life in Freshwater Environments

To start, a little background on the MARSLIFE plan for the 2011 field season. This year we will return to Pavilion Lake and explore the unknown realm of Kelly Lake with a targeted sampling approach aimed at capturing the unique biodiversity discovered from last years initial sampling.  Pavilion and Kelly Lakes hold a vast diversity of super exciting microbes encompassing bacteria, archaea, protists, and viruses/phages. These microbes are the biotic key to understanding the flow of nutrients critical to maintaining life within such a nutrient poor water column and how these systems form similar microbialite structures. Preliminary data suggest that Pavilion Lake has biotic similarities to other worldwide microbialite/stromatolite sites such as, Highborne Cay, Shark Bay, Pozas Azules II, and Rios Mezquites.

The REAL question for this field season:

Are the microbes found in Kelly similar to those found in Pavilion and the other microbialite/stromatolite sites?

In only 3 days we finally get to look at Kelly microbialites, which appear to be structurally similar to the microbialites found in Pavilion Lake! Our GOAL is to capture its biological diversity, relate it to Pavilion Lake and other microbialite/stromatolite sites.

ULTIMATELY, these results will provide insight on how these structures might be formed on other solar system bodies, such as Mars or Europa.

After three Deepworker seasons at Pavilion Lake – and multiple years of science scuba exploration before that – we are moving to Kelly Lake this year. You already knew that – but how do the two tie together? What will be similar and what will be different?

Kelly Lake and Pavilion Lake are similar in that they both have microbialites, and with similar morphologies (shapes) too! But at Pavilion the microbialites are just about everywhere – while at Kelly Lake they are only in a few locations. Why is that? We have done some scuba diving in Kelly Lake, but because of the limitations of how much time we can spend underwater, we haven’t been able to really map where the microbialites occur. So this year we’ll use the Deepworker submersibles to really get a close look at where all the Kelly microbialites are and how they look. They could all be similar to what we see at Pavilion – but until we go and look we just don’t know.

And speaking of mapping – we already have bathymetry (depth) and SONAR (surface hardness and roughness) data for Kelly Lake, which gives us at least some idea of where to go look for what we think are microbialites. But this data also shows us some interesting features that we haven’t seen in Pavilion Lake. For example, some of the sonar images look like gullies – the scours that are formed when water running down a hill causes a landslide. But this is underwater, so how did it form? Or there are some wavey features – what about those? Again, until we go and look, we just don’t know.

Our move to Kelly Lake is also interesting in an operational sense. After three years of having the submarines at Pavilion Lake, we largely knew what to expect. We knew how to plan missions, how long they would take, where to find the type of microbialites that a specific scientist was interested in. Because Kelly Lake is new, we have put together everything that we had learned from Pavilion Lake – both in terms of the science and the submarine exploration – and are using it to exploring our new Kelly Lake world. We have the bathymetry and sonar data, which are like having remote sensing data for another planet. So given that, how well can we do in planning the best missions, with the highest productivity and success for the selected tasks? This is really like going to another planet and using all of our training! The added pressure here is that we expect to only spend one season at Kelly Lake with the Deepworkers, which means that we have to do it all the first time: from general exploration of the lake, to selecting the best samples to collect, to which microbialites and features are of the greatest interest and should be imaged and explored the most.

This move isn’t to say that we have learned everything that we wanted to know about Pavilion Lake, but it does mean that our Deepworker exploration there has already yielded detailed maps of morphology distribution and mapping in the lake, and future work can focus on understanding choice locations through scuba diving. It is time to move to a lake like Kelly, where similar microbialites are present, but the environment is just different enough that it will put our understanding of how everything forms to the test.

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

April Fool’s Day in Vancouver, and the gray-black sky opened up. One of those cold pounding rains that makes you run in a crouch, hustling for cover. An umbrella-stealing rain. A rain that normally I wouldn’t go out in. But today I was splashing around and loving it, inches from the wet yet bizarrely dry, happily learning to pilot a DeepWorker one-person submarine.

Stan (the other student sub pilot) and I got to the West Van docks around 9 AM. Mike and the 2 Jeffs from Nuytco already had the subs ready, sleek and black with hatches open.

We had a classroom session on emergency procedures, what to do in case of fire, water leak, air leak, etc. We had sandwiches while Jeff told stories of using the subs to retrieve wrecks and bodies. We put on an extra layer of socks against the chill, climbed into our DeepWorkers feeling like race car drivers, and helped close the hatches. Kyle the crane operator smoothly lifted me first, up and clear, over and down the long pilings of the pier, into the cold green water of Burrard Inlet. Jeff in a dry suit unhooked me, carefully keeping his hands warm out of the water, and finally I got to the real work of the day – emergency drills, and sonar practice.

Before you submerge, the subs float where you see half sky and half sea. Today that was gray over green, and a little choppy, making the sub roll. As I sit and type this tonight I can still feel the slow roll of the sub in the water.

Gray over Green, from the surface of Burrard Inlet - Photo: Chris Hadfield

I confirmed by the little white radio microphone draped across my neck that my sub (‘DeepWorker 6’) was healthy, and got permission from Mike to dive. A reach down to the right to let water into the flotation tank, a sudden rush of white bubbles up the right side of the canopy, and magically I was back in another world. Somehow like slipping into oblivion.

Slipping into the green oblivion - Photo: Chris Hadfield

Burrard Inlet is a bad place to dive, with bits of stuff floating in the water, terrible visibility, and the bottom mostly gravel, rock, muck and the occasional pop can. I stared intently into the thick green fog, straining to see anything, but most of the time I barely saw the cloud of mud billow up just as I bumped into the bottom.

The main noise was from the 4 little propellers that moved me around. I steered with my feet, and the harder I pushed, the louder the noise and the faster I turned and went. I had to let up on the gas to hear Mike on the radio, as we went through the emergency drills. It was all pretty common sense stuff – if something’s leaking shut it off, if the air is bad use a mask, if water’s getting in head for the surface. Everybody was happy, and we got on to sonar work.

It was weird to pull the computer tablet out into my lap and have the Windows home screen there with me underwater. A few switch throws and the sonar display came up, replacing the green hill/blue sky with a multi-coloured radar scope. Mike and the Jeffs put targets into the water, and off I went, on a hunt.

Sonar display in DeepWorker: so near, and yet, so far - Photo: Chris Hadfield

I’m a poor sonar operator. Mostly the display looked to me like psychedelic ink blots. Jeff radioed me headings and distances, and once in a while I imagined I saw something on the sonar screen that matched. I tried driving fast to avoid drift, I tried slow and careful on heading, I tried up high near the surface, and I tried down by the bottom. Mostly I just drove where Jeff told me, and 3 times I found the sonar target suddenly looming out of the murk. I also found a piece of PVC pipe that I decided to pick up with the robot arm, clumsy on my first try with that. It uses a joy stick in my right hand, tipping and rolling it to move the arm joints, pulling the trigger to open and close the jaws. I got the pipe clamped on my 2nd try, and raised it high like a skinny algae-covered Olympic torch for the rest of the dive.

PVC Pipe, just like the Olympic Torch - Photo: Chris Hadfield

Jeff called and said it was 4:30, time to head back. I decided my prize PVC pipe would smell bad above water and let it go, and then pushed hard on my left heel to climb to the surface. As I broke into daylight I pulled a lever to fill the buoyancy tank with air, and then trundled over on the surface to where Jeff floated with the lifting hook. Kyle hauled me out and set my on the deck, still wet with rain. I did the last of the checks with Mike on the radio, opened the hatch, took off my warm socks, and climbed back out into the other, non-sub-piloting world.

When it’s April Fool’s Day and pouring rain, I recommend being underwater.

- Chris

About a year ago, I heard about the Pavilion Lake Research Project, which investigates weird microbial growths in a lake in British Columbia. It sounded like a lot of fun, but I wasn’t sure how to get involved. Then, about ten days ago, I got a call from someone who saw that I’d volunteered for the Desert RATS expedition later this year. He wondered whether I’d also be interested in “something even cooler than NEEMO, if not quite as cool as space flight.” I said, “Is it as cool as Pavilion Lake?”

Turned out it was Pavilion Lake. Hooray! So I threw a bunch of wool socks, fleece shirts, and Gore-Tex into a suitcase (I lived in Seattle for six years, and have some idea of what kind of weather to expect up here in March) and flew on up to Vancouver for a very quick introduction to the “whos” and “whats” of Pavilion Lake.

For me, the most important of the “whats” will be the DeepWorker submersible, the miniature submarine that I’ll be piloting to explore the lake this summer. The DeepWorker was developed by Nuytco, the same company that built the famous “Newt Suit” diving apparatus. DeepWorker is just big enough to hold one pilot, some ancillary electronics, and some life support and survival gear. Attached to the outside are four thrusters controlled by foot pedals inside, the batteries that power the whole craft, and the compressed-gas tanks. There’s also a small hydraulic manipulator that looks like a miniature version of the robot arms we use on the Space Shuttle and Space Station.

Today was the first day of DeepWorker school. The students are myself and Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. He has had some past exposure to submarines, but I know nothing about them, so this is all new to me! But no matter. After a quick but thorough briefing by Jeff Heaton, I climbed into DeepWorker #7. Jeff ran me through some system checks and we lowered the clear bubble hatch. The crane picked me up, swung me out over the water, and lowered me into it, all in not much more time that it takes to write it all down.

It’s strange to sit, totally secure and dry, bobbing in the sea with the waterline right at eye level. Strange, but not at all uncomfortable. The sub moved only sightly in the small waves we had with today’s fair weather. Once I’d had a chance to get used to the feeling of being in the water, Jeff talked me through some basic surface maneuvers, using the foot pedals to control the thrusters. Turn right and left, move forward and backward, follow a compass heading. All that went fine. Then it was time to flood the ballast tank and start working underwater. No problem: I moved the valve, a lot of bubbles came up from the right side of the sub as the tank filled, and the waterline crept up the clear dome and then closed over my head. I had wondered ahead of time how that would feel, and was pleasantly surprised that the sense of overwhelming coolness overrode any apprehension about being underwater.

One of the things I had looked forward to on this trip was seeing the undersea life of Puget Sound up close. Sadly, it was not to be–the water was very murky, making it hard to see anything beyond the snout of the sub. So I didn’t see much marine life–Nor, during later maneuvering, did I see one of the nearby dock pilings until after I’d felt a bump!

The first dive was short and sweet. If seemed as if only a few minutes had passed when Jeff asked me to resurface for lunch. We all enjoyed a nice meal in the sunshine (unusual for this place and season). Chris and I chatted a bit with some folks from the local and national media, then prepared for the next dive of the day.

The second sortie cemented the lessons of the first. It also added some basic sonar navigation work and exercised the automatic depth-holding function. All very cool. Again, the time seemed to fly by, and all too soon they were hoisting us out of the water.

In all, it was a great day. The sub is a marvel, the instruction was topnotch, and I can’t wait to do it again tomorrow!

-Stan