Cold Hard Facts (Mission Critical)

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Engineering Professor Laura Ray has worked with undergraduate students to build a robot that can monitor climate change in the most remote areas of Greenland.

The team flew to Summit Station on the Greenland Ice Sheet this summer for a test run of its creation, known as Cool Robot.

Now, the group is painstakingly perfecting the robot to get it ready for the next test run in 2013. The first goal is to make the solar panels use the sun—Cool Robot’s only power source—more efficiently.

“That’s a long lead item, so that’s what’s on the drawing board for this year,” Ray said.

Ultimately, Ray hopes Cool Robot will be able to autonomously measure air particulates and snow roughness in the most frigid of conditions.

The project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Dartmouth is collaborating with the University of New Hampshire and the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL).

Read the full story, published in the winter edition of Mission Critical magazine.

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