The topic of this lecture is a bit different from before because it is about the work of space explorers, which is used to find water on Mars and Lunar.
The company Honeybee Robotics is professional in developing and operating small mechanical tools used on Mars missions which cooperates with NASA.
The lecture introduced the way of searching life in outer space:
Finding Water->Deciding habitability -> Life
This gave me an idea of water is the basic condition for lives.
The lecturer briefly showed several spacecraft that has been built:
- 2008 Mars Phoenix
- 2011 MSL Curiosity
- Mars Ice Breaker
I found my interested part of study may also be applied to this, such as the application of similarity landscape detection and element detection.
And there are several next steps:
- 2018 Green Land
- 2028 Mars PLD
Besides, several questions are needed to be answered when doing exploration on mars:
- How much water?
- Where are they?
- How to extract ?
These three questions are quite important which defines the fundamental goal of the detection and they are quite difficult to answer even when there are a lot of robots on the planet, because those planets are huge and different places may contain different water; to cover the planet on wheel will definitely take a long time, so the detection itself is hard work. What’s more, lacking atmosphere may make robots fragile which means meteorite can destroy those machines and ruin the periodic research.
What I want to ask is, ‘Can the explorer be equipped with more detecting tools to detect other type of condition suitable for lives?’. For example, though on earth ,water is crucial to lives, on the other planets ,maybe lives can be supported by other objects which have the similar functionality as water but not found yet.
The company is also doing project on Lunar, the goal is to capture samples and deliver to crucible, then seal.
The presentation is very attractive because it did not just give theoretical summary but presented a lot of diagrams to explain how their work going and the procedure of detecting water on planets. I think those pictures are not only skilled but also attractive to me, as an amateur.
I am a fan of astronomy, so this lecture is of great interest to me and give me more information of what we are doing on Mars and Lunar.
Furthermore I think some machine learning technique can be, less or more, applied in this project. We can establish a model to establish the the model of image we have and the water underneath. This will be useful when we try to estimate the approximate amount of water of the target. I don’t think the expense of this would be higher than launch a real rocket and send a robot to the lunar which also faces high risk.
To sum up, this is a good talk which gave me a lot of news and knowledge about exploring the other planets and I believe there will be one that is suitable for life to born and live in.
