NASA Prepares To Drill for the “Oil of Space”

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (04) ◽  
pp. 24-28
Author(s):  
Judy Feder
Keyword(s):  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
South Pole ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Core Tube ◽  
Ground Truth Data ◽  
Water Ice ◽  
Oil And Gas Exploration ◽  
Paired Samples ◽  
The Impact

“We’re going to the Moon, and we’re going there to stay this time,” has become a NASA mantra as the US competes with other countries, including China and Russia (https://jpt. spe.org/esa-roscosmos-to-mine-oxygen-water-from-moon-rocks-as-nasa-eyes-first-artemis-lunar-mission), to be the first to put humans on the Moon and Mars. The race will rely heavily on using resources available on the planetary bodies - or in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Chief among these is water, which has been called “the oil of space.” As NASA prepares for Artemis mission astronauts to land on the Moon in 2024, it will fly at least two preliminary missions to look for water and gather information about the lunar south pole. The Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment (PRIME-1) and Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) missions, which will be launched in late 2022 and 2023, respectively, will be the first missions to study ISRU on another celestial body. They will also mark the first time NASA will robotically sample and analyze for ice from below the surface. And they will use technologies transferred and adapted from oil and gas exploration. Reconnaissance Missions Data from nearly 3 decades of lunar orbiter and impactor missions suggest that the Moon’s “soils,” particularly at its south pole and other regions, could contain hundreds of millions of gallons of water that could eventually be harvested and converted to oxygen, fuel, or drinkable water for human use on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But, at what concentrations? In what kinds of soils? And is the water in a form that’s accessible? Most of the information we have about the presence of water-ice on the Moon comes from orbital measurements. The only direct evidence acquired to date came in 2009 from a sensing satellite aboard a spacecraft that was purposely crashed in the Cabeus crater. The material ejected as a result of the impact was analyzed with a spectrometer to reveal the presence of 5.6%±2.9% water-ice by mass. The form, distribution, composition, and quantity of the water-ice remain largely uncertain. The only way to reduce this uncertainty is to obtain ground-truth data by drilling exploratory boreholes in the crater. This will be the purpose of the PRIME-1 and VIPER missions. PRIME-1 will last a week to 10 days, during which a robot will deploy a drill and mass spectrometer to harvest and preliminarily evaluate moon-ice for quality and regional heights and to determine how much of the ice is lost to a process known as sublimation, wherein the water transforms directly from solid ice into vapor, rather than first going through a liquid phase. In addition to ice, PRIME-1 will gather samples including rock samples to help date the sequence of impact events on the Moon, core tube samples to capture ancient solar wind trapped in regolith layers (unconsolidated, inorganic rocky material), and paired samples of material to characterize the presence of volatiles and to assess geotechnical differences between materials inside and outside permanent shadows. The samples will be returned to Earth and studied to characterize and document the regional geology, including the small, permanently shadowed regions. The data from the mission will help scientists understand how a mobile robot to be used on the subsequent VIPER mission can search for water at the Moon’s pole, and how much water may be available to use as NASA plans to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon by the end of the decade (Fig. 1).

Biological contamination studies of lunar landing sites: implications for future planetary protection and life detection on the Moon and Mars

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
D.P. Glavin ◽  
J.P. Dworkin ◽  
M. Lupisella ◽  
G. Kminek ◽  
J.D. Rummel
Keyword(s):  
Ground Truth ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Ground Truth Data ◽  
Planetary Protection ◽  
Biological Contamination ◽  
Life Detection ◽  
Solar System Exploration ◽  
Robotic Missions ◽  
Human Exploration ◽  
The Impact

Chemical and microbiological studies of the impact of terrestrial contamination of the lunar surface during the Apollo missions could provide valuable data to help refine future Mars surface exploration plans and planetary protection requirements for a human mission to Mars. NASA and ESA have outlined new visions for solar system exploration that will include a series of lunar robotic missions to prepare for and support a human return to the Moon, and future human exploration of Mars and other destinations. Under the Committee on Space Research's (COSPAR's) current planetary protection policy for the Moon, no decontamination procedures are required for outbound lunar spacecraft. Nonetheless, future in situ investigations of a variety of locations on the Moon by highly sensitive instruments designed to search for biologically derived organic compounds would help assess the contamination of the Moon by lunar spacecraft and Apollo astronauts. These studies could also provide valuable ‘ground truth’ data for Mars sample return missions and help define planetary protection requirements for future Mars bound spacecraft carrying life detection experiments.

scholarly journals A flexible ChIP-sequencing simulation toolkit

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
An Zheng ◽  
Michael Lamkin ◽  
Yutong Qiu ◽  
Kevin Ren ◽  
Alon Goren ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Ground Truth ◽  
Peak Calling ◽  
Simulation Framework ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Ground Truth Data ◽  
Chip Sequencing ◽  
Genome Wide ◽  
Experimental Parameters ◽  
Differential Binding ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Background A major challenge in evaluating quantitative ChIP-seq analyses, such as peak calling and differential binding, is a lack of reliable ground truth data. Accurate simulation of ChIP-seq data can mitigate this challenge, but existing frameworks are either too cumbersome to apply genome-wide or unable to model a number of important experimental conditions in ChIP-seq. Results We present ChIPs, a toolkit for rapidly simulating ChIP-seq data using statistical models of key experimental steps. We demonstrate how ChIPs can be used for a range of applications, including benchmarking analysis tools and evaluating the impact of various experimental parameters. ChIPs is implemented as a standalone command-line program written in C++ and is available from https://github.com/gymreklab/chips. Conclusions ChIPs is an efficient ChIP-seq simulation framework that generates realistic datasets over a flexible range of experimental conditions. It can serve as an important component in various ChIP-seq analyses where ground truth data are needed.

scholarly journals CO2 uptake decreased and CH4 emissions increased in first two years of peatland seismic line restoration

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Schmidt ◽  
Scott J. Davidson ◽  
Maria Strack
Keyword(s):  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Ecosystem Respiration ◽  
Tree Seedlings ◽  
Co2 Uptake ◽  
Seismic Line ◽  
Oil And Gas Exploration ◽  
Net Productivity ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Seismic Lines ◽  
Reference Areas

Abstract Oil and gas exploration has resulted in over 300,000 km of linear disturbances known as seismic lines, throughout boreal peatlands across Canada. Sites are left with altered hydrologic and topographic conditions that prevent tree re-establishment. Restoration efforts have concentrated on tree recovery through mechanical mounding to re-create microtopography and support planted tree seedlings to block sightlines and deter predator use, but little is known about the impact of seismic line disturbance or restoration on peatland carbon cycling. This study looked at two mounding treatments and compared carbon dioxide and methane fluxes to untreated lines and natural reference areas in the first two years post-restoration. We found no significant differences in net ecosystem CO2 exchange, but untreated seismic lines were slightly more productive than natural reference areas and mounding treatments. Both restoration treatments increased ecosystem respiration, decreased net productivity by 6–21 gCO2m− 2d− 1, and created areas of increased methane emissions, including an increase in the contribution of ebullition, of up to 2000 mgCH4m− 2d− 1. Further research on this site to assess the longer-term impacts of restoration, as well as application on other sites with varied conditions, will help determine if these restoration practices are effective.

scholarly journals An approach for detecting changes related to natural disasters using Synthetic Aperture Radar data

2015 ◽  
Vol XL-7/W3 ◽  
pp. 819-826 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Milisavljevic ◽  
D. Closson ◽  
F. Holecz ◽  
F. Collivignarelli ◽  
P. Pasquali
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Aperture Radar ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Radar Data ◽  
Synthetic Aperture ◽  
Optical Remote Sensing ◽  
Ground Truth Data ◽  
Synthetic Aperture Radar Data ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Aperture Radar

Land-cover changes occur naturally in a progressive and gradual way, but they may happen rapidly and abruptly sometimes. Very high resolution remote sensed data acquired at different time intervals can help in analyzing the rate of changes and the causal factors. In this paper, we present an approach for detecting changes related to disasters such as an earthquake and for mapping of the impact zones. The approach is based on the pieces of information coming from SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and on their combination. The case study is the 22 February 2011 Christchurch earthquake. <br><br> The identification of damaged or destroyed buildings using SAR data is a challenging task. The approach proposed here consists in finding amplitude changes as well as coherence changes before and after the earthquake and then combining these changes in order to obtain richer and more robust information on the origin of various types of changes possibly induced by an earthquake. This approach does not need any specific knowledge source about the terrain, but if such sources are present, they can be easily integrated in the method as more specific descriptions of the possible classes. <br><br> A special task in our approach is to develop a scheme that translates the obtained combinations of changes into ground information. Several algorithms are developed and validated using optical remote sensing images of the city two days after the earthquake, as well as our own ground-truth data. The obtained validation results show that the proposed approach is promising.

scholarly journals Long-Term Land Deformation Monitoring Using Quasi-Persistent Scatterer (Q-PS) Technique Observed by Sentinel-1A: Case Study Kelok Sembilan

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pakhrur Razi
Keyword(s):  
High Performance ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Deformation Monitoring ◽  
Acquisition Time ◽  
Satellite Orbits ◽  
Mountainous Area ◽  
Ground Truth Data ◽  
Persistent Scatterer ◽  
Land Deformation ◽  
The Impact

Located on the mountainous area, Kelok Sembilan flyover area in West Sumatra, Indonesia has a long history of land deformation, therefore monitoring and analyzing as continuously is a necessity to minimize the impact. Notably, in the rainy season, the land deformation occurs along this area. The zone is crucial as the center of transportation connection in the middle of Sumatra. Quasi-Persistent Scatterer (Q-PS) Interferometry technique was applied for extracting information of land deformation on the field from time to time. Not only does the method have high performance for detecting land deformation but also improve the number of PS point, especially in a non-urban area. This research supported by 90 scenes of Sentinel-1A (C-band) taken from October 2014 to November 2017 for ascending and descending orbit with VV and VH polarization in 5 × 20 m (range × azimuth) resolution. Both satellite orbits detected two critical locations of land deformation namely as zone A and Zone B, which located in positive steep slope where there is more than 500 mm movement in the Line of Sight (LOS) during acquisition time. Deformations in the vertical and horizontal direction for both zone, are 778.9 mm, 795.7 mm and 730.5 mm, 751.7 mm, respectively. Finally, the results were confirmed by ground truth data using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) observation.

scholarly journals A NEW STEREO DENSE MATCHING BENCHMARK DATASET FOR DEEP LEARNING

2021 ◽  
Vol XLIII-B2-2021 ◽  
pp. 405-412
Author(s):  
T. Wu ◽  
B. Vallet ◽  
M. Pierrot-Deseilligny ◽  
E. Rupnik
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Training Dataset ◽  
Ground Truth Data ◽  
Aerial Photogrammetry ◽  
Dense Matching ◽  
Benchmark Datasets ◽  
3D Scene ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. Stereo dense matching is a fundamental task for 3D scene reconstruction. Recently, deep learning based methods have proven effective on some benchmark datasets, for example Middlebury and KITTI stereo. However, it is not easy to find a training dataset for aerial photogrammetry. Generating ground truth data for real scenes is a challenging task. In the photogrammetry community, many evaluation methods use digital surface models (DSM) to generate the ground truth disparity for the stereo pairs, but in this case interpolation may bring errors in the estimated disparity. In this paper, we publish a stereo dense matching dataset based on ISPRS Vaihingen dataset, and use it to evaluate some traditional and deep learning based methods. The evaluation shows that learning-based methods outperform traditional methods significantly when the fine tuning is done on a similar landscape. The benchmark also investigates the impact of the base to height ratio on the performance of the evaluated methods. The dataset can be found in https://github.com/whuwuteng/benchmark_ISPRS2021.

Improvement of generalization capability of two-dimensional salt segmentation via iterative semi-supervised learning

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Lingxiao Jia ◽  
Satyakee Sen ◽  
Subhashis Mallick
Keyword(s):  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Unlabeled Data ◽  
New Method ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Learning Tools ◽  
Generalization Capability ◽  
Oil And Gas Exploration ◽  
Depth Images

Accurate interpretations of subsurface salts are vital to oil and gas exploration. Manually interpreting them from seismic depth images, however, is labor-intensive. Consequently, use of deep learning tools such as a convolutional neural network for automatic salt interpretation recently became popular. Because of poor generalization capabilities, interpreting salt boundaries using these tools is difficult when labeled data are available from one geological region and we like to make predictions for other nearby regions with varied geological features. At the same time, due to vast amount of the data involved and the associated computational complexities needed for training, such generalization is necessary for solving practical salt interpretation problems. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised training, which allows the predicted model to iteratively improve as more and more information is distilled from the unlabeled data into the model. In addition, by performing mixup between labeled and unlabeled data during training, we encourage the predicted models to linearly behave across training samples; thereby improving the generalization capability of the method. For each iteration, we use the model obtained from previous iteration to generate pseudo labels for the unlabeled data. This automated consecutive data distillation allows our model prediction to improve with iteration, without any need for human intervention. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency, we apply the method on two-dimensional images extracted from a real three-dimensional seismic data volume. By comparing our predictions and fully supervised baseline predictions with those that were manually interpreted and we consider as “ground truth”, we find than the prediction quality our new method surpasses the baseline prediction. We therefore conclude that our new method is a viable tool for automated salt delineation from seismic depth images.

The Application of Microbes in Petroleum Industry

2013 ◽  
Vol 868 ◽  
pp. 542-546
Author(s):  
Ji Hua Wang ◽  
Shan Shan Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Enhanced Oil Recovery ◽  
Oil Recovery ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Oil Pollution ◽  
Petroleum Industry ◽  
Oil Industry ◽  
Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery ◽  
Oil And Gas Exploration ◽  
The Impact

With the advances in biological sciences, microbiology techniques to be applied to people in all areas of production and life, this paper introduces the microorganisms in the oil industry in all sectors such as oil and gas exploration microorganisms, microbial enhanced oil recovery and microbial degradation of the oil pollution and other aspects of the application. By summarizing the impact of microbial technology for the various aspects of oil industry, make the foundation of the microbial creative application in the field of oil industry.

Quantification of ground ice through petrophysical joint inversion of seismic and electrical data applied to alpine permafrost

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Coline Mollaret ◽  
Florian M. Wagner ◽  
Christin Hilbich ◽  
Christian Hauck
Keyword(s):  
Electrical Resistivity ◽  
Melting Point ◽  
Joint Inversion ◽  
Geophysical Methods ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Ground Ice ◽  
Ground Truth Data ◽  
Water Ice ◽  
Refraction Seismic ◽  
Ice Content

&lt;p&gt;Quantification of ground ice is particularly crucial for understanding permafrost systems. The volumetric ice content is however rarely estimated in permafrost studies, as it is particularly difficult to retrieve. Geophysical methods have become more and more popular for permafrost investigations due to their capacity to distinguish between frozen and unfrozen regions and their complementarity to standard ground temperature data. Geophysical methods offer both a second (or third) spatial dimension and the possibility to gain insights on processes happening near the melting point (ground ice gain or loss at the melting point). Geophysical methods, however, may suffer from potential inversion imperfections and ambiguities (no unique solution). To reduce uncertainties and improve the interpretability, geophysical methods are standardly combined with ground truth data or other independent geophysical methods. We developed an approach of joint inversion to fully exploit the sensitivity of seismic and electrical methods to the phase change of water. We choose apparent resistivities and seismic travel times as input data of a petrophysical joint inversion to directly estimate the volumetric fractions of the pores (liquid water, ice and air) and the rock matrix. This approach was successfully validated with synthetic datasets (Wagner et al., 2019). This joint inversion scheme warrants physically-plausible solutions and provides a porosity estimation in addition to the ground ice estimation of interest. Different petrophysical models are applied to several alpine sites (ice-poor to ice-rich) and their advantages and limitations are discussed. The good correlation of the results with the available ground truth data (thaw depth and ice content data) demonstrates the high potential of the joint inversion approach for the typical landforms of alpine permafrost (Mollaret et al., 2020). The ice content is found to be 5 to 15 % at bedrock sites, 20 to 40 % at talus slopes, and up to 95 % at rock glaciers (in good agreement to the ground truth data from boreholes). Moreover, lateral variations of bedrock depth are correctly identified according to outcrops and borehole data (as the porosity is also an output of the petrophysical joint inversion). A time-lapse version of this petrophysical joint inversion may further reduce the uncertainties and will be beneficial for monitoring and modelling studies upon climate-induced degradation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mollaret, C., Wagner, F. M. Hilbich, C., Scapozza, C., and Hauck, C. Petrophysical joint inversion of electrical resistivity and refraction seismic applied to alpine permafrost to image subsurface ice, water, air, and rock contents. Frontiers in Earth Science, 2020, submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wagner, F. M., Mollaret, C., G&amp;#252;nther, T., Kemna, A., and Hauck, C. Quantitative imaging of water, ice, and air in permafrost systems through petrophysical joint inversion of seismic refraction and electrical resistivity data. Geophysical Journal International, 219 (3):1866&amp;#8211;1875, 2019. doi:10.1093/gji/ggz402.&lt;/p&gt;

scholarly journals The Canadian Arctic: The Changing Seascape of Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration Issues

2010 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wylie Spicer ◽  
And Tanya Bath
Keyword(s):  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Canadian Arctic ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Oil And Gas Development ◽  
Oil And Gas Exploration ◽  
The North ◽  
Offshore Oil And Gas ◽  
Offshore Oil ◽  
The Impact

This article examines issues affecting the offshore oil and gas business in the Canadian Arctic. It begins by discussing the impact of international conventions and the roles of the international organizations that administer them, or have direct interests in the Arctic. It then addresses the implications of Canadian sovereignty, relevant legislation, land claim agreements with Aboriginal groups, and Aboriginal cases currently before the Supreme Court of Canada. It concludes with thoughts and speculations concerning the possible futures for offshore oil and gas development in the north.

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