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News

Prof set to chart the Red Planet

Research of Vilalta and colleagues could unlock clues to the history 
of water on Mars 

by James Bolen
The Daily Cougar

A UH faculty member will be part of a team helping to map the landscape on Mars and potentially foster greater understanding of the planet. 

Ricardo Vilalta, an assistant professor of computer science, and principal investigator Tomasz Stepinski of the Lunar and Planetary Institute received a $250,000, three-year grant from NASA's Applied Information Systems Department for a study titled "Automated Identification and Characterization of Landforms on Mars."

LPI's parent organization, Universities Space Research Association, was created in 1969 to provide an avenue through which universities can collaborate with one another, the government and other organizations to further space research.

Vilalta is also co-director of UH's Data Mining and Machine Learning Group. The group's work includes the design and development of a statistical-learning tool for classification and characterization of topographical features on Mars.

This SLT automates geomorphic mapping and expedites geologic mapping, which enables efficient study of large sections of the Martian surface.

Identifying natural landscape structures, such as craters and valley networks, is considered important by the research team because rocks, minerals and geologic landforms hold clues to past water activity on Mars. 

An automated system of analysis is essential to this area of study, Vilalta said. 

"There's a lack of automated tools designed to assist planetary scientists with analyzing the surface of Mars, and only a small percentage of the data collected has been analyzed," Vilalta said. "In fact, most of the latest work is based on a method known as descriptive geomorphology, essentially consisting of narrating what is in a picture. The scientific community needs automated methods to look for complex patterns across Mars' surface."

Varying ideas about what technique should be utilized to study the Martian landscape exist in the scientific community, Vilalta said.

"At this time, most studies are subjective and there is great debate over who is right and who is wrong," Vilalta said.

Vilalta's current research utilizes data obtained from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. The team's research specifically involves analyzing massive amounts of data with the intent of extracting meaningful and informative patterns. 

The data are subsequently used to construct global topographic maps of Mars in the form of digital elevation models. The research group's goal is to publish a comprehensive catalog of the entire Martian surface.

"This will be a great step toward understanding the nature of the planet," Vilalta said.

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