It's not a robot for the sake of building a robot, but it's a robot for science.
The fact that we can control it from anywhere only enables
more applications to be able to be loaded on this platform and be used for different scientific purposes.
Our main concern and main motivation was to be able to come over here was to be able to test it in the extreme environment
and temperature is definitely one of the most difficult issues
to deal with, because electronics and batteries
and pretty much all the components of the robot behave differently
at these cold temperatures and so we tested all the different systems
in the cold, we let the robot outside for
many days at a time, trying to see if that would affect it
and from what we can tell, we have very good
performance in the cold.
GROVER represents the ability to collect an enormous amount of data
it would really revolutionize how much information we can get about the ice sheet
on Greenland. It would really open a lot of doors
Snow is really important because it reflects a lot of the
energy and heat form the sun. So if you lose snow in a lot of places
it's going to heat up even more because of the bare ground
will absorb more energy from the sun, whereas snow reflects it
Places like Greenland which are covered in snow
are very important. It's a large area of of the Earth's surface
that's reflecting energy, so it's really important to track the changes here.
So this summer we are going to test GROVER at Summit
that's basically in the center of Greenland at one of the highest points in Greenland
It's an area where snow accumulates.
We are measuring several different things
about the snow pack with the radar. The big one that we're interested in
right now is the melt that happened in July of last year, in July of 2012
it was a fairly unique event
there was some ice that covered most of Greenland's surface
and it has snowed since so there's about 60 centimeters on top of that
The radars on GROVER will not only be able to look at accumulation
but will also be able to resolve how large that melt layer is
and start to look at the quantity of water that melted
and then percolated down and then re-froze