Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Best known for building complex machines to explore the far reaches of space, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is developing robots designed to explore something a little closer to home: the insides of a volcano.
According to Popular Science, JPL researchers recently announced that they had begun testing a two-wheeled, one-foot long robot known as VolcanoBot 1 in Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, which is still active. The seven-inch tall unit can transmit information about the currently-empty fissures that had once conducted magma up towards the surface, the website added.
During its initial voyage down into the volcano last May, VolcanoBot 1 reached depths of 82 feet below the surface, but researchers hope that future versions of the machine will be able to travel much further down. Mapping out inactive fissures, they explain, could help scientists learn how magma travels to the surface, as well as how eruptions themselves actually occur.
“We don’t know exactly how volcanoes erupt. We have models but they are all very, very simplified,” Carolyn Parcheta, a NASA postdoctoral fellow based at Pasadena, California-based JPL, said in a statement. “This project aims to help make those models more realistic.”
“In order to eventually understand how to predict eruptions and conduct hazard assessments, we need to understand how the magma is coming out of the ground,” she added. “This is the first time we have been able to measure it directly, from the inside, to centimeter-scale accuracy.”
Parcheta and her colleagues hope that they will be able to map the underground fissures well enough to create a 3D map of the fissure, something that up until now has only been estimated. The team has plans to test a smaller, lighter version known as VolcanoBot 2 in March, and that version will be able to turn its vision center to examine the features around it.
Of course, their work is not without its potential extraterrestrial applications as well. On both Earth and Mars, NASA explains, fissures are the most common physical features through which magma erupts. This is also likely true on the moon, Mercury, and other planetary bodies, though the exact mechanics of volcanic eruption (past and present) in these places remains unknown.
“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,” explained Aaron Parness, a robotics researcher at JPL and Parcheta’s co-advisor. “We don’t have the technology yet to explore them, but they are so tantalizing! 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.”
“Having Carolyn in the lab has been a great opportunity for our robotics team to collaborate with someone focused on the geology,” he added. “Scientists and engineers working together on such a small team is pretty rare, but has generated lots of great ideas because our perspectives on the problems are so different.”
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