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Dr. Ed Cloutis has over 25 years of expertise in Earth and planetary remote sensing. His research focuses on developing new applications of remote sensing to exploring the surface of the Earth and planets in the solar system, both for geology and the search for extraterrestrial life. He is the founder and Director of the University of Winnipeg's Planetary Spectrophotometer Facility, a state-of-the-art lab dedicated to advancing planetary exploration.

Cloutis is a member of science teams associated with a number of planetary exploration missions, including the NASA-led Dawn asteroid rendezvous mission, the NASA Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) rover, the NASA-CSA OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, and the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and ExoMars rover.

Asteroid sample lands on campus

In early 2024, Dr. Cloutis led a team of researchers in analyzing a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid sample that was collected during NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission.

“You can think of it as using a really high-end digital camera to look at how the sample reflects light through different filters,” Dr. Cloutis explained. “It’s a non-destructive way to analyze the sample, so it’s a very desirable kind of analysis because it doesn’t affect the sample in any way.”

Great care was taken to ensure the sample—a vial of black powder weighing about 200 milligrams—was never exposed to the Earth’s atmosphere. Special equipment was required to take possession of the sample, which had to be housed in a sealed, nitrogen-filled box and stored in a safe.

Meteorites are often recovered and studied, but they hold more limited research potential.  “When a meteorite lands on Earth, it immediately starts to get contaminated by microbes and other stuff in the atmosphere,” Dr. Cloutis said. “This asteroid sample, by contrast, is a pristine slice of what’s out there in space.”

Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid that took NASA’s spacecraft two years to reach, was chosen as the target of study because it is a time capsule of sorts left over from the birth of the Solar System. “We like to think of these asteroids as remnants of the Solar System when it formed,” Dr. Cloutis said.

Collaborating on a new satellite

In 2023, Dr. Ed Cloutis and his team of researchers at the Centre for Terrestrial and Planetary Exploration (C-TAPE) contributed their expertise to the UM CubeSat project – a new satellite to be deployed from the International Space Station.

The project was led by University of Manitoba engineering students within the Space Technology and Advanced Research Laboratory (STARLab). The compact satellite, which is about the size of a milk carton, is designed to collect information on how space conditions affect the appearance of the surfaces of asteroids and the Moon. Data from the satellite is sent back to Earth for study – with the aim of helping researchers understand how the appearance of the surfaces of asteroids and the Moon can change over time.

To the Moon!

In 2022, Dr. Cloutis and his team of students partnered with Mission Control Space Services in the development and deployment of a terrain classifier, MoonNet. This cutting-edge software payload flew to the moon with the ispace HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lander.

Supported by a grant from the Canadian Space Agency, this mission saw MoonNet, as well as the UAE’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre rover, known as Rashid, launch on a SpaceX rocket from the United States and delivered to the Moon by ispace Inc., a Japanese spacecraft technologies company.

Mission Control subcontractor Xiphos Technologies provided a modern flight computer, which hosted MoonNet, an artificial intelligence application to classify types of lunar geological features visible in images captured by Rashid on the lunar surface.

The outputs of the AI were transmitted to a cloud-based Mission Control platform, from which mission data was distributed to the science operations team. This enabled the mission’s science team to support a variety of experiments and support its navigation decisions in real time.