Analysing Rock Samples for the Mars Lander

In the near future NASAintends to explore various regions of our solar systemusing robotic devices such as rovers, spacecraft, airplanes, and/or balloons. Such platforms will carry imagingdevices, and a variety of analytical instrumentsintended to evaluate the chemical and mineralogicalnature of the environment(s)that they encounter. Theimagingand/or spectroscopic devices will acquire tremendous volumesof data. The communicationband-widths are restrictive enoughso that only a small portion of these data can actually be sent to Earth. Theaim of this research wasto developa systemwhich analyses rock spectra to automatically determinewhich spectra are interesting, and to compressthe spectral data for communicationto Earth. In the research we report here weclassify laboratory data using clustering techniques (ACProan enhancedversion of Autoclass) and providethe planetary scientists witha rapid, visually oriented methodof evaluating the underlying chemical and mineralogical information con...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Jonathan J. Oliver, Ted Roush, Paul Gazis, Wray L. Buntine, Rohan A. Baxter, Steven R. Waterhouse
• Keywords: Data Mining, KDD 1998, Systemusing Robotic Devices, Theimagingand/or Spectroscopic Devices, Tremendous Volumesof Data