Current News
September 23, 2008: ENDURANCE is crated up at Port of Hueneme,
California ready for its flight on a C-17.
Past News
August 23, 2008: ENDURANCE was tested again in the Neutral Buoyancy
Laboratory
pool at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
June 21, 2008: ENDURANCE was tested in the Neutral Buoyancy
Laboratory
pool at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
May 15, 2008: ENDURANCE underwent further testing in a quarry in the
Austin,
Texas area from May 13-15.
March 26, 2008: ENDURANCE was tested in a quarry in the Austin,
Texas area. We performed several "mowing" maneuvers that will be
identical to how we plan to map West Lake Bonney. The total powered
mission took 90 minutes and covered more than a kilometer. We also
performed a wall-follow maneuver where the multi-beam sensor was
remounted for side look mapping while the vehicle maintained a standoff
range of 5m from the wall, which is similar to how we plan to map the
Blood Falls glacier face in West Lake Bonney. These two videos show
visualizations of the data collected during these missions. The
incomplete sonar coverage is from interference by weeds - a problem we
most certainly won't have in Antarctica
Week of February 11, 2008:
Wisconsin
Field Test - During the week we tested the cold
water functioning of ENDURANCE and its maneuvering
under an ice-cover in Lake Mendota. Lake Mendota is adjacent Madison
Wisconsin. We are grateful to a number of individuals and groups at
University of Wisconsin who assisted us in this effort, including:
Center for Limnology (Jim Kitchell, Paul Hanson, Dave Harring), Civil
and Environmental Engineering (Chin Wu)
Various news sources ran articles on this including Scientific
American and the Chicago
Tribuneand UIC
News.
December 14th, 2007: Peter Doran and William Stone gave
presentations on the
ENDURANCE project at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San
Francisco in session P52A: Europa
Exploration: Earth Analogs and Mission Studies
Various news sources ran articles on this including
New
Scientist and
Science
Daily
October 29, 2007: Peter Doran and William Stone presented an
overview of the
ENDURANCE
project at the Geological Society of America meeting
April, 2007: Various news sources covered the announcement of the
ENDURANCE
project including UIC News,
Astrobiology
Magazine,
NASA