Thanks to Dr. Carolyn Parcheta and her co-advisors at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there’s now a robot that can explore volcanoes to see how they work on Earth, possibly investigate them in space, and probably uncover a lot of secret supervillain lairs.
Parcheta is a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s JPL who’s been interested in volcanoes since she first watched a researcher take a lava sample way back in the sixth grade. “I said to myself, I’m going to do that some day,” she said in a NASA news release.
Parcheta with VolcanoBot 2. (via NASA/JPL-Caltech)
VolcanoBot 1 explored fissures in the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. It stuck to mapping out inactive fissures, though the volcano itself is still active. But that’s just practice for the main event with future versions of VolcanoBot: exploring volcanoes in space. Aaron Parness, co-advisor on the project, said,
“In the last few years, NASA spacecraft have sent back incredible pictures of caves, fissures and what look like volcanic vents on Mars and the moon. We don’t have the technology yet to explore them, but they are so tantalizing! Working with Carolyn, we’re trying to bridge that gap using volcanoes here on Earth for practice. We’re learning about how volcanoes erupt here on Earth, too, and that has a lot of benefits in its own right.”
Space may be a long term goal, but VolcanoBot 2 will continue the work here on Earth in the coming months as it uses its updated abilities to make even more detailed maps of fissures at Kilauea. The VolcanoBots are updated versions of previous JPL bots called Durable Reconnaissance and Observation Platform (DROP). Those were all fine and good, but Parcheta needed more, saying, “We took that concept and redesigned it to work inside a volcano.”
So I’m going to go ahead and imagine Parcheta just walks around her daily life looking at technology and thinking, “This is nice, but could we get a version that works inside a volcano, you guys? I’m going to need one like that.” Bad. Ass.
(via Blastr)
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