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Communications geniuses: Mike “Mountain Dew” Down, Marc Seibert, Mike Miller

By Rafferty Pendery

Written by: Jennifer Biddle

The PLRP group has been together for quite a few years, doing research on Pavilion Lake and now Kelly Lake in remote areas of British Columbia. As you can imagine, this has allowed for awesome science, cool exploration – and a lot of practical jokes. As I wrote the other day, this is my first year up here, but many of these folks I’ve known for years at this point. The nice thing about the type of work we’re doing – science/exploration awesomeness – is that it pushes a family mentality. We are all relying on each other to do our jobs. Of course within a family mentality, roles need to be filled: the taskmasters, the renegades and of course, the jokesters.

It turns out that a tradition while doing field work in this area is to stop at a local restaurant for a breakfast challenge of consuming a single, but massive pancake. PLRP rumors say that Dr. Allyson Brady is a force to be reckoned with in terms of pancake eating, and stories still circulate about folks in field camp that walked away without empty plates, even if the failure was years ago. A few weeks ago, Allyson spoke with me about the field season and threw down the pancake challenge. Never one to step down from a challenge, I accepted. A few days ago, a group of us went to challenge ourselves with carbohydrates and sugary syrup. The pancakes arrived a tad smaller than usual, but as you can see by the picture – still quite massive.  They were absolutely delicious. A bunch of us finished (capturing the feat with photographic evidence). One member of our group failed, and now has permanently received “dishwasher” status, which was actually given to her by the restaurant staff! All in all it was a good time. Unfortunately my body realized what I had done to it a few hours later and I hardly ate the rest of the day! It was a nice diversion from the cold and rainy weather that beset us that day, and a good escape from the awesome confines of the mobile mission command center, where we spend the majority of our days.

Speaking of which, we are spending our days side by side through meals, work and most of us are sharing hotel rooms with colleagues, some of whom we just met when we arrived. Scientists are used to this type of atmosphere – I know that it’s not unusual for me to fold my colleague’s laundry if it means I can get my clothes into the dryer faster! I don’t know if every job has these sorts of hazards! I personally enjoy the collegial family atmosphere and know that when I leave this place, I’ll leave with great friends who I may be lucky enough to work with in the future. I’m also going to leave with a new place to come on vacation: the field camp is new this year in that we’ve been staying at the lovely Cariboo Lodge in Clinton, BC. Even the hotel staff have gotten into the hijinks – their target this year has had his bed made upside down, gotten short sheeted and I’m pretty sure had a canoe waiting in his bed. It’s great that everyone is enjoying the welcoming atmosphere and are willing to have a little fun while working incredibly long days. People who enjoy having fun are wonderful people to work with!

Most days I do science in a bright, cluttered (yet clean), indoor laboratory. Right now, I am sitting on the shore of a pristine lake in British Columbia, waiting for samples of microbialites. Long days and late nights in lab is what you pay the piper for sample collections in beautiful, remote locations.

What I knew of British Columbia was what I saw during the Vancouver Olympics and a handful of nature shows. It was beautiful, with tall mountains, good skiing, and killer whales. What I didn’t know was how diverse and rugged the landscape would be. I flew into Vancouver and drove a rental car up to our field site along with my advisor, Dr. Jen Biddle. We passed through the city into tall snow-capped peaks covered in conifers. Beautiful, but about what I expected for BC. My expectations were quickly dashed. Lush forests spit waterfalls down into the Fraser River. Within an hour or two, the conifers gave way to more rock outcroppings, and eventually huge, sheer cliffs with rocks of all different colors. The vegetation changed to more bristly, desert flora. Winding streams worked their way through distant pastures, dotted with gnarled trees, horses, and cows; eventually all spilling into the Fraser, a constant throughout our drive. As we approached the town of Clinton, our base of operations for this expedition, the conifers returned, although this time in different arrangements. The dense coastal firs, spruces, and hemlocks gave way to more sparse cedars and ponderosa pine forests that populated steep, rocky canyons. Tucked away deep in the folds of these ancient canyons are two very unique and exciting lakes.

Pavilion Lake and Kelly Lake are home to a fantastic display of microbialites. A fun, quirky, inspired (from what I’m beginning to see) group of scientists with a variety of backgrounds have descended on these lakes to study these structures because they may hold answers to some of the most profound questions we can ask. What did some of the earliest life on this planet look like? How did it survive and evolve? The fossil records show that for a couple billion years of our planets history, life existed similarly to how it does on the microbialites of Pavilion and Kelly Lake. If these structures were such an important first step in Earth’s life history, might they also be something to look for when we eventually explore other planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond? As a microbiologist, with a strong interest in astrobiology, these questions floor me. To be here in this beautiful countryside searching for answers is what some refer to as “pinch me” moments.

My role here is to help understand the bacterial communities that live on the surface of the microbialites, and from what we can tell, drive their formation. I have spent the past few days taking part in planning and execution of submersible dives and sample collection. Once samples arrive at base camp, I extensively document what I see. Interesting features such as curious green and purple nodules that may be the site of carbonate formation on the surface of the microbialites are sub-sampled and examined under the microscope. Larger chunks of microbialite are carefully bagged and frozen for shipment back to the lab at the University of Delaware. There, I will extract DNA to study the microbial population of these structures on the genomic level to determine which members of this population are most important at different depths. This study highlights one of the unique attributes of Kelly Lake and Pavilion Lake. Microbialites are found in a handful of places around the globe yet these lakes are the only environment where they are found at such a variety of depths (thus differential access to light). It is our hope that these varying growth environments within the lake will be able to highlight distinct attributes of microbialites that made them so successful on early Earth and could possibly aid their formation on other planetary bodies.

Written by:  Joe Russell

One of our tough divers - water is not very warm.

Diving for Samples

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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

Mike Gernhardt with the DeepWorker barge in the background

This is my third year as a submarine pilot/scientist on the Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) and it is really exciting and informative to be part of this team and to watch the progression and trends in the science and operational methods that are being applied to this expedition.  I originally became involved in the PLRP because of the use of the dual DeepWorker submersible system as an operational analog to the dual Lunar Electric Rover system that my team at NASA is developing.  The really special thing about PLRP is that it’s not a simulation, its real world-class science and the methods that we use to plan the flights collect and analyze the data, and the lessons we learn are directly relevant to future space exploration. It’s also pretty cool that we are seeing things that human eyes have never seen before and in that sense it’s analogous to finding life on Mars or some other planet.

Mike Gernhardt and Bill Todd (front) work as CapCom on the surface vehicle, while Steve Wittig (back) captains the nav boat

The main contributions of our NASA Exploration Analogs and Mission Development team (EAMD) are to perform the operational research necessary to characterize the productivity and effectiveness of the operation and then systematically analyze the data and use the results to refine the operational methods over a multi-year period with the aim of achieving the highest level of scientific return from the human and machine assets deployed during the expedition.  To this end we have developed a variety of metrics that characterize the data, and observation quality along with the operational performance and timeline data.  These metrics are then correlated with the scientific merit metrics that we have developed with the PLRP team to understand the right balance between operational discipline and scientific flexibility. Is the right answer going to be totally rigid flight plans and flight rules to control every minute or the exploration dives, or complete scientific flexibility to explore whatever seems most interesting at the time? Probably neither,  the optimal mix is most likely  somewhere in between and this multi-year research program provides a unique opportunity to find that optimal mix here on earth so that we don’t have to learn those lesson out in space were the expense and consequences are much higher.

-Mike

Mike Gernhardt, ready for deployment in DeepWorker.