In addition to Cassidy and Apostolopoulos, the research team will include two other Carnegie Mellon researchers, two NASA Ames researchers and a glaciologist from the Antarctic Chilean Institute. The team will meet up with its equipment later this month in Punta Arenas, the southernmost town in Chile, and will fly to Antarctica on Dec. 29 or thereafter, weather permitting. The team will make its camp at Patriot Hills, a well-explored area where Adventures Network International, a private camp, operates a camp for its Antarctic tourist business. Nomad, the robot that crossed the Atacama, is now in pieces in a Carnegie Mellon high bay, as graduate students and staff members rewire it and insulate it to allow it to operate in the cold. The robot will be tested this winter in the Pittsburgh cold in preparation for a scheduled 1998-99 visit to Antarctica.
Plans call for testing a custom-designed meteorobot the following year.
Whittaker, Fredkin research professor at the Robotics Institute, the meteorobots would extend the meteorite hunt almost year-round. But power limitations and logistical considerations make it most likely that the robots would probably work the same eight-week collecting season as their human counterparts. Apostolopoulos said he's not sure exactly how the system might work. The first generation of the robots wouldn't actually collect meteorites, but might flag or otherwise mark specimens that could be picked up later by humans. Or, a robot might work in an area along with humans, scanning snow-covered areas that people couldn't search.