Misc

Miscellaneous uploads

Project: Greenland glacier cameras

Alberto's recent project to help monitor a glacier front in Greenland. The sensors are cameras/weather stations with Iridium satellite telemetry.

Project: Tumbleweed - JPL Polar Rover Project

The Tumbleweed Rover, currently under development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, is a large, wind-blown, inflated ball, which carries an instrument payload in its interior. Such rovers offer an effective and simple means of gathering data over large spatial extents of Earth, Mars, and other solar system bodies. Tumbleweeds could prove to be a safe and economical way of deploying instruments such as a ground penetrating radar or a magnetometer in numerous hostile environments. The latest version of the rover was recently deployed in Greenland, where it completed a more than 100km autonomous traverse across an ice sheet. Communicating via the Iridium satellite network, the rover in question successfully and reliably relayed live GPS, temperature, and pressure data to a ground station at JPL for nearly ten days. The follow-on rover is currently being readied for a traverse from the South Pole to the coast of Antarctica some 2000km away. The Antarctic test, to take place in February of 2004, will obtain mapping data in collaboration with the ADD project of the British Antarctic Survey to demonstrate Tumbleweed's effectiveness in harvesting data in extreme and remote settings.