Antarctic Meteorite Search
1997 Antarctic Expedition

Overview

From December 29th, 1997 to January 22, 1998, eight members of the Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search team visited the Patriot Hills region, located near 80S by 81W in Ellsworth Land, Antarctica. The purpose of the expedition was to provide site evaluation, perform component technology tests and data collection, gain field experience, and search the area for meteorites.

The robotics agenda for this expedition involved experiments that will help evaluate technologies to be used on robots that will work in Antarctica and other high latitude regions in search for meteorites.

The technologies of interest are communications, power, satellite based positioning, sky (sun) based positioning, visual sensing, radar sensing, and spectrometry. Below are some links to experimental descriptions and results from this years field tests.

  1. General field notes from the expedition members
  2. Solar Power Experiment
  3. Radar Mapping Experiment
  4. Panoramic Imaging Experiment
  5. Satellite Communication Experiment
  6. Spectrometer Experiment
  7. GPS Positioning Experiment
  8. Sun Tracking Experiment
  9. Meteorite Search Trips

Robotic Search for Antarctic Meteorites 1997
All material on this page is property of NASA and Carnegie Mellon University. Any image or text taken from this site and pasted into any other document without consent violates the Copyright Law of the United States and the Berne International Copyright Agreement.
Send comments, questions, or suggestions to: meteorite-info@ri.cmu.edu
This document prepared by Matthew Deans