Transcripts of GROVER_preview_youtube_hq

Meet NASA’s newest Arctic rover. The Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research or GROVER, for short. Unlike its cousins on Mars GROVER is headed to Greenland to study the accumulation of snow and ice. Comberiate: This is like a spacecraft that operates on the ground. You see what I mean? It's just like a spacecraft because it has to survive in a hostile environment unattended for months at a time, while we are communicating with it sporadically, just like with a satellite, and then send it a command or two to change its operating mode and then let it alone, let it do its thing and then come back later and check it again. NARRATION: GROVER was actually designed by several teams of engineering students over the last three years, who tested different prototypes on different kinds of terrain. Koenig: GROVER is actually a great project. It brought together scientists, engineers and educators. And how it came to me actually as the scientist involved was the engineers came to me and they said hey we wanna build a robot. Do you have any science that a robot could do? And I said well yes, actually I do. I spend a lot of time studying accumulation on the ice sheets. And how we do that a lot is we drive snowmobiles or we fly aircraft with radars in them and I said well, I bet a robot could carry a radar and I started asking them questions because I didn't know a lot about robotics. And they answered my questions and I gave them kind requirements. Could this robot drive 50 kilometers a day? Could it be autonomous? What sort of terrain could it go over? What sort of winds could it withstand? NARRATION: The result was a six foot tall, 800 pound rover, comprised of a ground-penetrating radar large solar panels, rechargeable batteries, a computer, and repurposed snowmobile tracks for locomotion. The hope is that GROVER can collect much more data than humans could on the ground. Koenig: When we're on snowmobiles, we could do about 50 kilometers, in one day. That would be a difficult day, 50 to 75 kilometers for scientists to be riding on a snowmobile. You get cold and you need to stop for the day. So if GROVER can meet that expectation, GROVER should be able to gather more data than a human could, working in the ice sheet environment and for a longer period of time. It'll go slower than we would with snowmobiles, but when it goes for 24 hours which a human can't, it'll actually  gather more data for us. Comberiate: That whole idea is great because if you can get that to work then you can run robots like this all around Antarctica and Greenland and places like that where it's very harsh and difficult to operate manually. 

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