Robotic astrobiology - enhancing scientific productivity of planetary rover missions

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This proposal involves attempting to provide a sophisticated robotic scientist facility onboard future planetary rovers. In particular, Mars is of interest for its astrobiological potential but Mars is remote and distant. The communications windows to the Martian surface from Earth are sporadic and fleeting. This makes making a Mars rover smarter essential especially since they are proxies for scientists on Earth. If we do not impart sufficient scientific intelligence to the rover, it may miss important scientific phenomena. This proposal seeks to redress that by making the rover smart enough to make scientific decisions on its own. This will involve a complex interplay of image processing, expert systems and learning neural networks to model how a human scientist thinks. This is not to replace the human geologist or astrobiologist of course, merely to augment them. Until human astronauts land on Mars, these rovers are our proxies, performing scientific investigations on our behalf. By giving them enhanced scientific capabilities, we can maximise their scientific productivity so we can learn more about these extraterrestrial environments, and ultimately, whether life does, or has, existed on Mars. Currently, very few people are working on this aspect so this offers an opportunity for Canadian engineers and scientists to take the lead in this field. It will become increasingly important as future rover missions become more sophisticated and demanding.