Life in the Atacama : Science Autonomy for 1 Improving Data Quality

" Science autonomy " refers to exploration robotics technolo-3 gies involving onboard science analysis of collected data. These techniques 4 enable a rover to make adaptive decisions about which measurements to col-5 lect and transmit. Science autonomy can compensate for limited communi-6 cations bandwidth by ensuring that planetary scientists receive those images 7 and spectra that best meet mission goals. Here, we present the results of au-8 tonomous science experiments performed in the Atacama Desert of Chile dur-9 ing the Life in the Atacama (LITA) rover field campaign. We aim to pro-10 vide an overview of autonomous science principles and examine their inte-11 gration into the LITA operations strategy. We present experiments in four 12 specific autonomous science domains: (1) autonomously responding to ev-13 idence of life with more detailed measurements; (2) rock detection for site 14 profiling and selective data return; (3) tactical replanning to efficiently map 15 the distribution of life; (4) detecting novel images and geologic unit bound-16 aries in image sequences. In each of these domains we demonstrate improve-17 ments in the quality of returned data through autonomous analysis of im-18 agery.