Current News

 

April 5, 2011

ENDURANCE data analysis tools available for download

The tools that we have developed to investigate our data are now available through the Looking Glass and Sonar Data pages.

Past News

 

April 20, 2010

ENDURANCE is featured in National Geographic's Explorer Series

The episode Explorer: Journey to an Alien Moon is available on the here

 

April 9, 2010

ENDURANCE second antarctic field season featured in the MSNBC article Antarctic diving robot practices for Europa

The article is available on the here

 

December 11, 2009

The second deployment has been successfully completed.

Blog postings from the field are now available on the Bonney 09 page

The latest post is from December 11th, 2009.

 

December 28, 2008

Blog postings from the field are now available on the Bonney 08 page

The latest post is from December 21st.

 

December 6, 2008

This image of West Lake Bonney, showing the ENDURANCE site on the lake, was taken by the satellite Quickbird on December 6th. The color re­solution of the image is 2.4m and 60cm in the pan­chro­matic (grayscale) band. The image was pro­cessed by Paul Morin of the Antarctic Geo­spatial Infor­mation Cen­ter by pan­sharpening it and adding the color bands to the higher resolution grayscale band.

You can click on the image for a higher resolution version. Look for the red, blue, and yellow tents north of the glacier and the big blue tent in the middle of the lake.

 

September 28, 2008

ENDURANCE is crated up at Port of Hueneme, California ready for its flight on a C-17.


 

June 21, 2008 and August 23, 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.

 

Wall Mapping test data

Bottom Mapping test data

 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 14, 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