Experimenter's Notebook: Robotic Search for Antarctic Meteorites 2000 Expedition

• Main Author: Michael Wagner
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2000
• Subjects: 4; Antarctic; Elephant Moraine; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.33.8119; http://robotweb.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub2/wagner_michael_d_2000_1/wagner_michael_d_2000_1.pdf

This document serves as an archive of expedition notes taken by Michael Wagner in January 2000 during the Robotic Search for Antarctic Meteorites expedition to Elephant Moraine, Antarctica. The culmination of a three year effort developing Nomad as a robotic explorer occurred when Nomad made the first meteorite discoveries by a robot. Through the use of autonomous science target recognition, Bayesian classification techniques and mission planning, Nomad classified meteorites while performing patterned searches. Three meteorites were autonomously found and classified and, in total, five meteorites were classified correctly throughout the expedition. A total of 42 samples were analyzed after 2500 m