How can the exploration of a Canadian lake, using deep-water submersibles, help NASA plan for the human exploration of Mars? What’s the most effective way to explore an unknown world? These are questions that members of the Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) hope to address this summer when they conduct their first comprehensive underwater study of Kelly Lake in British Columbia, Canada. PLRP will be using planning software developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA Ames Research Center initially as a task-planning tool for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers.

“Pavilion is particularly interesting because it is a real science mission,” says Mike McCurdy, who leads that software-development group. “I see a lot of similarity between the priorities of the Pavilion team and the priorities of the Mars folks that we worked with in the past, in terms of really wanting to maximize the science output of the mission…. In some ways, that’s our bread and butter. That’s where our tools got their start.”