GSA President's Medal Lecture: ROBOTIC FIELD GEOLOGY

Technological advances now allow meaningful geologic exploration of a planet’s surface to be carried out robotically. Robotic field geology, however, requires new techniques and processes that are not common to traditional field geology. Robotic systems on distant planets suffer from many limitations, including limited mobility, tightly constrained data bandwidth to Earth, modest capabilities for manipulating geologic materials, and long operational latencies. The challenge of robotic field geology is to overcome these limitations by exploiting unique strengths that robotic vehicles possess. These strengths include scientific instrumentation that is not normally available to a field geologist, and the ability to harness the efforts of a large and experienced team of scientists to make operational decisions. The Mars Exploration Rover Project has developed a set of techniques and procedures that have enabled effective field geology to be carried out on the martian surface. The talk will review how these techniques and procedures were first developed, and describe how they have been put to use for more than eleven years of exploration by the robots Spirit and Opportunity.