Back to the Arctic next summer :-)

On Friday, I received notice that a year-old proposal for automated drilling has been accepted by the Mars Instrument Development Program. I'm a co-investigator, and my role will be to place sensors, collect the operating data, and derive fault syndromes from the data that can be used in turn to automate the drill's operation in future summer deployments.

The drill hardware has been jointly developed by the folks at Baker-Hughes and Johnson Space Center in Houston. I'm supposed to eventually produce the more-intelligent portion of the control software.

And our proposed summer field test site is on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic (to the left of Ellesmere I. on a globe), so I'll get summer field experience at another Mars-analog site. That should be lots of fun... the test site is at 80 deg. north, and the climate is significantly different than on Devon I. Although the carbonate units are supposedly similar...

What's an "open architecture"?

The vehicle health management contractor (Northrop) wants to supply its end-products only in Windows versions. I'm the contract monitor, and believe that open-source-compatible versions are in the public's and NASA's best interest. And I have no way to run anything on Windows, since all I have access to are OS X Macs, Suns, and Linux boxes. The contractor wants to charge extra to provide non-MS copies of the software.

( What's an 'open architecture'? )