Details
Lake Bonney in Antarctica
ENDURANCE has
been funded through NASA's ASTEP
program.
Its goals are to:
- further biological research in the terrestrial
environments analogous
to those found on other planets,
- develop technologies that enable remote searches for, and
identification of, life in extreme environments
- perform a systems - level field campaign designed to demonstrate
and
validate the science and technology in extreme
environments on Earth.
(Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring the
Planets)
Program.
Floor of Lake Bonney
We are
deploying
an instrumented AUV (Autonomous Underwater
Vehicle) into
ice-covered Lake Bonney in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica to
test two hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1:
The low kinetic energy of the system (diffusion dominates
the
spatial transport of constituents) produces an ecosystem and
ecosystem
limits that vary significantly in three dimensions.
Hypothesis 2:
The whole - lake physical and biogeochemical structure
remains static
from year to year.
The AUV will also allow us to:
Produce a detailed 3D map of sub-surface West Lake Bonney.
Produce a detailed 3D map of the sub-surface face of Taylor glacier
with high resolution photos mosaiced onto the mesh.
ENDURANCE AUV
The ENDURANCE AUV is being built by Stone Aerospace in Austin Texas,
and is based off of an earlier vehicle known as DepthX.
ENDURANCE
spent a week in February 2008 in Madison Wisconsin being field tested
in
ice-covered Lake Mendota
ENDURANCE is spending December 2008 deployed in
Antarctica.
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
Once the data
has been
collected it will be visualized using a variety
of 2D and 3D high - resolution display technologies at the
Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of
Illinois at
Chicago.