Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada

Agenda
- Plan route for initial sun-synchronous experiment in Von Braun Planitia
- Move Hyperion to Von Braun Planitia

Status and Progress
- Beautiful weather!

- Deployed Hyperion to the test area. Hyperion drove (largely
autonomously with statistics still to be computed) to our intended start
location 1.4km northwest of our base camp. During the this traverse
Hyperion successfully forded three streams. Hyperion was teleoperated
from the base camp during the water crossings. It was also necessary to
climb one snowfield. After some initial skidding Hyperion successfully
climbed the grade with its speed lowered to 5cm/sec. The terrain
perception and local navigation system performed flawlessly including
autonomous traverse through several rockfields that required substantial
obstacle detection and avoidance. Plenty of twists and turns.

- Debugged mission planner. Shortly before the intended start
(12:00amCST) of our first sun-synchronous traverse a problem was
detected with the plan (the start location was 29km away). This was
tracked down to a problem introduced when we corrected the geodetic
coordinate system of our digital elevation model (DEM) from the WGS84 to
NAD27. (The DEM was believed to be WGS84 but this was determined to be
incorrect in our earlier ground truth measurements of the test site.)
We debugged this problem, generated a new sun-synchronous plan and
Hyperion drove to it new start location 1.1km away.

- Distance driven in field experimentation to date 2734m.

- Foreshadowing the next report, our first sun synchronous traverse
began at 7:30amCST on July 18.

Upcoming
- Test sun-synchronous navigation

Weather
Early: Scattered clouds. 10C. Winds 5-10kph.
Late: Sunny. 10C. Winds 5kph.

Quote of the Day
"Where's Jim?"