Details
ENDURANCE has been funded through NASA's
ASTEP
(Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring the Planets)
Program. ENDURANCE will:
- 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.
Lake Bonney
We will deploy an instrumented AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) into
ice-covered Lake Bonney in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica to
test two hypotheses:
H1: 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.
H2: The whole-lake physical and biogeochemical structure remains static
from year to year.
Floor of Lake Bonney
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.
ENDURANCE 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 in preparation for its deployment to
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