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Completed TRL 3 (started at 2, targeting 3)
Autonomous measurements of gases and volatiles with a distributed network of in situ instruments will be a powerful capability in both Planetary and Earth Science, as well as human exploration missions. Such a capability can help identify localized sources of key species that might provide insights into the cycles of those species; efficiently map out those key species by ensuring that only the most scientifically valuable data is collected; and aid in the target selection for detailed analysis by a complementary instrument, sample return missions, or in situ resource utilization. The development of a highly miniaturized, yet high performing gas sensing instrument (i.e., Multifunctional Sensor Platform (MSP)) developed by the PI under the ECI program, along with the various autonomous algorithms (i.e., meta-agent) developed by the GSFC Distributed Systems Mission (DSM) team, provides a great opportunity to develop autonomous science capability and demonstrate it in the field. In this proposal, we plan to develop a “science module” for processing, selecting, and packaging the MSP data in a form compatible with the meta-agent used for autonomous decision making and autonomous navigation. Once successful, we will demonstrate this capability during an upcoming field campaign in Alaska already funded by a Planetary Science and Technology Analog Research (PSTAR) project in Summer 2024.
The extremely low resource footprint allows us to distribute a network of MSP instruments on the surface of a planetary body such as Mars or Moon, or in a permafrost field site in Alaska, and acquire a spatiotemporally resolved map of chemical species of interest such as CH4, H2O, or CH4, respectively. even better than a distributed network of instruments is an “autonomous” network of instruments, which will reduce the number of nodes required to capture spatial variations of species or identify localized sources, and minimize the extent of human interaction needed
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