Planetary Lake Lander: Using Technology Relevant to Titan's Exploration to Investigate the Impact of Deglaciation on Past and Present Planetary Lakes

The Planetary Lake Lander project (PLL) is deploying and remotely operating a lake lander to gain operational experience that will help us better understand the technology and payload necessary, possible system constraints, and to develop solutions to overcome design issues for future lake lander missions. PLL’s scientific mission in Chile is focused on the study of deglaciation. Disrupted environmental, physical, chemical, and biological cycles challenge us to identify newly emerging natural patterns and to find the most productive methods to interrogate them rapidly. In many ways, the rapidity of Earth’s deglaciation confronts us with the same operational scenario as a planetary mission faced with only limited time to understand the environment and achieve its objectives. The priority for all time-, bandwidth- and often power-constrained planetary operations is to return the most informative data [1-2]. To maximize return, such missions would greatly benefit from intelligent, adaptive systems that can rapidly establish environmental baseline, track changes as they happen, adapt their data collection rate to monitor them, and prioritize data return. Such systems would be applicable to a vast array of planetary missions by improving the ability of any robots to make decisions on their own between command cycles.