Autonomous Detection of Dust Devils and Clouds on Mars

Author

Castano, A. ; Fukunaga, Akira ; Biesiadecki, J. ; Neakrase, L. ; Whelley, P. ; Greeley, R. ; Lemmon, Michael ; Castano, Rebecca ; Chien, Stanley

Author_Institution

Jet Propulsion Lab., Pasadena, CA, USA

fYear

2006

Firstpage

2765

Lastpage

2768

Abstract

Acquisition of science in space applications is shifting from teleoperated gathering to an automated on-board analysis with improvements in the use of memory, CPU, bandwidth and data quality. In this paper, we describe algorithms to autonomously detect dust devils and clouds from a rover and summarize the results. The algorithms meet high hit-to-miss ratios and satisfy strict resource constraints. Both detectors have been uploaded to the Mars exploration rovers (MER). These are the first autonomous science processes in the rovers.

Keywords

Mars; clouds; dust; geophysical signal processing; object detection; planetary rovers; space vehicles; MER; Mars exploration rovers; acquisition of science; automated on-board analysis; clouds; dust devil detection; space application; teleoperated gathering; Atmosphere; Bandwidth; Clouds; Detectors; Event detection; Geology; Image processing; Laboratories; Mars; Propulsion; Extrater-restrial phenomena; Image analysis; Object detection;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Image Processing, 2006 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Atlanta, GA

ISSN

1522-4880

Print_ISBN

1-4244-0480-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICIP.2006.313120

Filename

4107142