The components have arrived and are being assembled! The Planetary Lake Lander (PLL) team is now actively preparing for the first field deployment, which will take place in Laguna Negra in the Central Andes of Chile between November 26 and December 16, 2011. Although candidate sites for the shore station have been selected by analyzing satellite imagery, PLL is still a collection of parts spread across tables at the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Lab. The team is currently training and learning how these various elements function and “talk” to each other.

PLL is a vertical profiler that will analyze the physico-chemical and biological evolution of Laguna Negra over time, as well as the evolution of its environment (e.g., atmospheric/climatic parameters). It’s the how that makes it special. Lake Lander will think about its actions, how it collects data from the environment, and how it can make mission-driven decisions without human intervention when/if needed outside planned activities.

In non-human planetary missions, robots are the only ones spending 100% of their time on the terrain they explore. Currently, robotic missions are structured around planning, sequences of commands, uploads, and downloads. The robot executes the plan, sends the data, and waits for the next command. Yet, many events of mission interest can occur when humans are not in the loop, and the science return of planetary missions can still be optimized. The idea is to make Lake Lander knowledgeable about its environment, and aware of changes that may occur and could be of significance for addressing the scientific questions of the mission.

Ultimately, the team wants the probe to make educated decisions on whether to take action without human intervention if an important event occurs in the lake, while staying within the daily energy budget. Decision-making can take many aspects, including changing data acquisition rates and data collection mode (e.g., sequence of actions). To reach that goal, the probe needs to learn about its environment and be able to recognize what is the norm, and what is out of norm. The first year of the project will be centered around this question.