ARTEMIS

where Is ARTEMIS Going?

The ARTEMIS deployment area is just south of McMurdo Station, a U.S. Antarctic Program research station, roughly due south of New Zealand. (image: Peter Kimball)

We are deploying ARTEMIS beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, specifically in McMurdo Sound, just South of McMurdo Station, the U.S. Antarctic Program research station that makes our field work possible. ARTEMIS will follow 10 km paths under the ice shelf and back out to the launch and recovery drill hole. We will only be able to use one drill hole (and associated base camp location) this season, so we hope to send ARTEMIS on a radial pattern of missions, as indicated in the graphic above, again taken from our Astrobiology Science Conference poster.

Reporting by Peter Kimball

Conditions Throughout Our Field Season

Eight of us are headed to McMurdo Station (sans ARTEMIS) on August 26 (weather permitting) as part of ‘Winfly’ (Winter Flight), the first grouping of flights to go to McMurdo since winter began. Our Winfly crew will work to select the best site to establish our base camp on the sea ice, and to set up as much of our gear as possible before ARTEMIS and the Mainbody crew arrive in October.

The amount of daylight we see will change drastically during our time at McMurdo. When the Winfly crew arrives in late August, the length of day will be changing very quickly, but the sun will only actually be above the horizon from 10am to 4pm. By the end of September, the sun will still set each day, but only briefly, and it will never be completely dark. In late October, the sun will quickly dip below the horizon for the last time, leaving us in round-the-clock daylight for the rest of our time at McMurdo (we leave when the sea ice becomes unstable in early-mid December). The figure linked below illustrates how lighting conditions vary at McMurdo throughout the year.

Lighting conditions at McMurdo throughout the year. (image: Ethan Dicks)

The temperatures we’ll experience will vary quite a bit from August to December as well. The figure linked below shows NIWA data for Scott Base (a Kiwi base next-door to McMurdo) plotted by the folks at metservice.com (check out their blog!). Note that the mean daily Maximum temperature is -23.4C in August, and rises to -1.2C in December… but cold days can be very cold, and high winds can be extremely dangerous. We fully expect to lose multiple working days to extreme weather conditions, especially early in our season.

NIWA data plotted by metservice.com showing monthly temperature averages at Scott Base (next-door to McMurdo). (image: metservice.com)

Reporting by Peter Kimball

ARTEMIS is Real!

ARTEMIS undergoes nighttime testing of her visual homing system with the illuminated docking bar. (photo: Peter Kimball)

Enough renderings and vector drawings! This blog needs the genuine article! Here are some photographs of ARTEMIS taken at various stages of testing in 2015. We’ll go over the anatomy of ARTEMIS in a future post…

Reporting by Peter Kimball

What Is ARTEMIS?

Mechanical rendering of the ARTEMIS robot. (image: Stone Aerospace)

ARTEMIS is a robot – a testbed for life-search technologies. We’re developing these technologies to search for life in the liquid oceans beneath the frozen crusts of icy moons in our solar system. The ocean beneath the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica is an excellent icy moon analog environment where we can deploy ARTEMIS to test life-search technologies and learn some things about our home planet while we’re at it.

ARTEMIS is designed and built by Stone Aerospace specifically to explore the environment beneath the Ross Ice Shelf. She has a range of 20 km, carries an on-board water sample collection system plus a broad suite of scientific sensors, and features the ability to hover precisely, bringing scientific equipment into contact with the ice ceiling overhead.

It’s one thing to cheerfully list off the designed capabilities of a robot. It’s quite another to actually build, deploy, and recover such a robot – especially in ice-covered antarctic waters. This blog will follow the field team as we head to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, send ARTEMIS beneath the ice for the first time, and work towards bringing back valuable scientific data from beneath the Ross Ice Shelf.

Reporting by Peter Kimball

ARTEMIS Nominal Mission Profile

Cartoon of a nominal ARTEMIS mission beneath the Ross Ice Shelf. (image: Peter Kimball)

We will launch and recover ARTEMIS through a 4′ (1.2 m) diameter drill hole in sea ice, just beyond the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. She will then transit 10 km away from the drill hole, and 10 km back, collecting scientific data and stopping to take water samples along the way. The cartoon above is taken from our Astrobiology Science Conference poster, and shows a nominal ARTEMIS mission. The length of time required for each mission will depend on water currents, but we expect them to last about 10 hours, and we hope to pull off about 15 of them by the end of the year.

The ice overhead means that ARTEMIS cannot simply surface and await rescue in the event of a problem. She must be able to return to the drill hole if anything goes wrong. This mission design places great importance on ARTEMIS’s navigation instruments and software (her ability to find her way back to the drill hole) and entails significant risk. However, this is exactly what an icy moon robot will have to do in order to get its data back to the surface for transmission to earth. Here on Earth, the mission design allows ARTEMIS to maximize her time under the ice collecting valuable data.

Again, it’s one thing to make a pretty picture of a nominal robotic field mission, but it’s quite another to actually pull it off. It’ll be several weeks of environment characterization, in-water testing, and debugging before we’re able to pull off a “nominal mission”.

Reporting by Peter Kimball