Dimi Apostolopoulos is heading for Antarctica and looking for problems.
Not trouble, mind you, just problems.
Apostolopoulos is manager of a new $1.5 million project to design solar-powered robots to search for meteorites on Antarctica. It's his job to solve problems. So he'd like to find as many as he can next month when an international team of scientists and he spend as many as four weeks on the frozen continent.
"I'll be pleased if we come back with a thousand problems," explained the 30-year-old native of Greece, "because then we'll have the time to solve them."
By 2000, he noted, he and fellow researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute must figure out how to build wheeled robots that can operate dependably in freezing temperatures, remain upright on the ice in blistering winds and run on the amount of energy that can be captured from the sun.
And the robots have to tell the difference between hunks of protoplanetary material that blazed a fiery trail through the sky on their way to Earth millions of years ago and plain old rocks.
This latter problem may be particularly daunting because human meteorite hunters, such as the University of Pittsburgh's William Cassidy, have a hard time explaining just how they do it, much less how machines could do it.
"I'm keeping an open mind," said Cassidy, who launched the annual U.S. meteorite-hunting program in Antarctica 21 years ago. Visual identification by humans "is the one method we know works. I'm not a robotics expert and probably for that reason it seems that there could be a lot of problems."
Cassidy heads the science team for the "meteorobot" project and will be among the team traveling to Antarctica later this month -- the first time he set foot on the ice since stepping down from the U.S. meteorite project five years ago.
Apostolopoulos said the other team members and he won't be taking any robots this year, but will test several instruments and technologies. Those experiments were shipped last Friday to Chile, beginning the first leg of a journey leading to Antarctica's Patriot Hills.
Since Japanese scientists found their first meteorite on the Antarctic ice in 1969, the continent has proven to be a treasure trove. Between 15,000 to 16,000 meteorites have been collected since Japanese and U.S. teams began their annual excursions.
In most parts of the world, meteorites are hard to find because wind and weather break them apart and because they get lost among other rocks and vegetation. In the Antarctic and in deserts, however, the dry air helps preserve them and the barren landscape makes them stand out. Also, in Antarctica meteorites often are buried by snow and ice, remaining safely frozen for millions of years.
Meteorites flow with the glacial ice toward the sea. But when the ice meets mountains or other outcroppings of rock, the ice and the meteorites are forced upward. The meteorites can become exposed to the air in these areas, called stranding surfaces.
The Antarctic meteorite searches gained prominence last year when NASA scientists said they believed that a Martian meteorite discovered during Cassidy's 1984 expedition to Allen Hills contained fossilized signs of life. Scientists are still arguing about the claims, but the episode demonstrated the potential of meteorite searches.
The more meteorites that can be gathered, the more likely it is that scientists find something fantastic, such as the Martian meteorite.
"A human can search only so long before he has to stop for lunch or to sleep," Cassidy said. Robots, by searching 24 hours a day, could swell the take.
Though meteorobots are a new idea, the project really is a continuation of Carnegie Mellon's efforts to develop robots for exploring other planets, said Apostolopoulos, himself a veteran of the Dante missions that sent robots walking inside active volcanoes in 1993 and 1994.
Most of the money for the project, in fact, comes from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which will be sending along two scientists from its Ames Research Center with Apostolopoulos' team.
Antarctica is a remote, dry, barren and cold environment analogous in many ways to the surface of the moon or Mars. Performing missions there can provide experience that should be valuable when mounting extraterrestrial expeditions.
In addition to Cassidy and Apostolopoulos, the research team will include two other Carnegie Mellon researchers, two NASA Ames researchers and a glaciologist from the Antarctic Chilean Institute. The team will meet up with its equipment later this month in Punta Arenas, the southernmost town in Chile, and will fly to Antarctica on Dec. 29 or thereafter, weather permitting.
The team will make its camp at Patriot Hills, a well-explored area where Adventures Network International, a private camp, operates a camp for its Antarctic tourist business.
Plans call for testing a custom-designed meteorobot the following year.
As initially conceived by William "Red" Whittaker, research professor at the Robotics Institute, the meteorobots would extend the meteorite hunt almost year-round. But power limitations and logistical considerations make it most likely that the robots would probably work the same eight-week collecting season as their human counterparts.
Apostolopoulos said he's not sure exactly how the system might work. The first generation of the robots wouldn't actually collect meteorites, but might flag or otherwise mark specimens that could be picked up later by humans. Or, a robot might work in an area along with humans, scanning snow-covered areas that people couldn't search.
Cassidy said humans primarily pick out suspected meteorites by their appearance -- they tend to look different from most of the other rocks in an area. Robots likely will rely on a variety of sensors, including metal detectors, ground-penetrating radars, spectrometers and video cameras.
Patriot Hills is not known to be a rich field for meteorites, Cassidy said, so he will take along meteorites borrowed from NASA's Johnson Space Center and the Smithsonian Institution to test the instruments.
The team will have to leave Antarctica by Jan. 26, but not before Cassidy celebrates his 70th birthday on the ice. Birthdays in Antarctica were routine during the years he directed the U.S. meteorite program.
"In the past, I always made it a point to find a meteorite on my birthday," Cassidy noted. "We'll see about that this year."