Nathalie Cabrol

Behavioral responses of freshwater calanoid copepods to the presence of ultraviolet radiation: avoidance and attraction

Published in Journal of Plankton Research

Binary choice experiments under natural solar radiation were used to test short- term behavioral responses of freshwater calanoid copepods to ultraviolet radiation (UV). Responses of the nine species from 15 populations spanning North and South America included both UV attraction and UV avoidance, and varied among habitats, species and populations....

A Serpentinization Origin for Jezero Crater Carbonates

Lakes on Early Mars: A Space-for-Time Substitution Experiment

Lakes were abundant and active on early Mars for 100s millions of years. As global climate change prevented liquid water from remaining stable at the surface, they left behind key evidence of their past existence and duration in the landscape morphology, mineralogy, composition, and topography. As significant markers of environmental change, they h...

Autonomous soil analysis by the Mars Micro‐beam Raman Spectrometer (MMRS) on‐board a rover in the Atacama Desert: a terr...

Published in Journal of Raman Spectroscopy

Laser Raman spectroscopy (LRS) has been proposed for in situ characterization of molecular species in planetary surface exploration, and three laser Raman spectrometers are included in the science payloads of two under-development missions to Mars (ESA- ExoMars2018 and NASA-Mars2020). We report the first rover test of a laser Raman spectrometer dev...

Planetary LakeLander—A Robotic Sentinel to Monitor Remote Lakes

Published in Journal of Field Robotics

This field report describes the design and operations of the Planetary LakeLander (PLL) probe and its ground data systems. LakeLander s primary mission is to characterize the physical, chemical, and biological processes occurring in a high-altitude lake, and how they are being impacted by rapid deglaciation. LakeLander s secondary purpose is to tes...

Light attenuation characteristics of glacially‐fed lakes

Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences

Transparency is a fundamental characteristic of aquatic ecosystems and is highly responsive to changes in climate and land use. The transparency of glacially-fed lakes may be a particularly sensitive sentinel characteristic of these changes. However, little is known about the relative contributions of glacial flour versus other factors affecting li...

Field demonstration of an instrument performing automatic classification of geologic surfaces

Published in International Journal of Astrobiology

This work presents a method with which to automate simple aspects of geologic image analysis during space exploration. Automated image analysis on board the spacecraft can make operations more efficient by generating compressed maps of long traverses for summary downlink. It can also enable immediate automatic responses to science targets of opport...

Sands at Gusev Crater, Mars

Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets

ANALYSIS OF AUTONOMOUS ROBOTIC CORE MATERIALS BY THE MARS MICROBEAM RAMAN SPECTROMETER (MMRS) DURING THE “LIFE IN THE AT...

Published in 2013 GSA Annual Meeting in Denver

© Copyright 2013 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to the author (s) of this abstract to reproduce and distribute it freely, for noncommercial purposes. Permission is hereby granted to any individual scientist to download a single copy of this electronic file and reproduce up to 20 paper copi...

Smart, texture‐sensitive instrument classification for in situ rock and layer analysis

Published in Geophysical Research Letters

[1] Science missions have limited lifetimes, necessitating an efficient investigation of the field site. The efficiency of onboard cameras, critical for planning, is limited by the need to downlink images to Earth for every decision. Recent advances have enabled rovers to take follow-up actions without waiting hours or days for new instructions. We...

Geochemical profile of a layered outcrop in the Atacama analogue using laser‐induced breakdown spectroscopy: Implication...

Published in Geophysical Research Letters

[1] We performed laboratory laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and laser Raman spectroscopy measurements on samples from a layered outcrop from the Atacama Desert, Chile. This outcrop is a terrestrial morphological and possibly mineralogical analogue for similar formations that will likely be investigated by the Curiosity rover at Gale Cra...

Lakes on Mars

On Earth, lakes provide favorable environments for the development of life and its preservation as fossils. They are extremely sensitive to climate fluctuations and to conditions within their watersheds. As such, lakes are unique markers of the impact of environmental changes. Past and current missions have now demonstrated that water once flowed a...

Dynamics of declining lake habitat in changing climate

Published in Lakes on Mars, Edited by NA Cabrol and EA Grin. Elsevier BV ISBN 978-0444528544, 2010, p. 347-370

As discussed in previous chapters, identifying traces of water activity and ancient aqueous sedimentary basin deposits was an essential step in documenting whether early Mars was habitable. Evidence for a wetter history was provided repeatedly during the past 40 years of exploration by orbiters and more recently from the ground by the MER mission. ...

1—Searching for lakes on Mars: Four decades of exploration

Published in Lakes on Mars

Lakes are time capsules. On Earth, they are considered sentinels of climate change (Williamson et al., 2009) and may have played the same role on early Mars (eg, Baker, 2001; Cabrol and Grin, 2002, 2005). Their basins capture the record of geological and environmental fluctuations over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales (Figure 1.1). Terre...

Gusev Crater, Mars: Observations of three dust devil seasons

Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets

[1] Spirit began operations in Gusev Crater in January 2004 and has returned data on three seasons of dust devil (DD) activity. Total DDs observed were 533 in season one, 101 in season two, and 127 in season three. Their general characteristics are the same within factors of 2 among the seasons, with median diameters of 19 m in season one, 24 m in ...

Prokaryotic diversity pattern in high‐altitude ecosystems of the Chilean Altiplano

Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences

[1] The Chilean Altiplano is the westernmost part of a large volcanic-sedimentary plateau in the central Andes. High solar irradiance and rapid increase of temperature have contributed to make it a hot spot of global climatic change. In this study, we describe microbial diversity in the summit lake of the Simba volcano (5,870 m) and the evaporitic ...

Other analogs to Mars: high-altitude, subsurface, desert, and polar environments

Published in Life in Antarctic Deserts and other Cold Dry Environments: Astrobiological Analogs

The McMurdo Dry Valleys detailed in previous chapters represent one environment for life thought to have existed on Mars among many. This chapter illustrates other potential habitats and their significance:(1) highaltitude lakes subjected to rapid climate change in the Andes provide analogy to the Noachian/Hesperian transition on Mars;(2) Rıo Tinto...

The High-Lakes Project (vol 114, pg G00D06, 2009)

Published in Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences

Chapter 10: Other Analogs to Mars: High altitude, subsurface, desert, and polar environments. In: Life in Antarctic Dese...

Slope Perception from Monoscopic Field Images: Applications to Mobile Robot Navigation

Published in Journal of Automation Mobile Robotics & Intelligent Systems

When remotely navigating a mobile robot, operators must estimate the slope of local terrain in order to avoid areas that are too steep to climb or that slope so steeply downward that the operator would lose control of the rover. Although many rovers are equipped with sensor systems to aid the operator in this task, it is sometimes necessary to esti...