Effective scientific exploration of remote targets such as solar system objects increasingly calls for autonomous
data analysis and decision making on-board. Today, robots in space missions are programmed to traverse from
one location to another without regard to what they might be passing by. By not processing data as they
travel, they can miss important discoveries, or will need to travel back if scientists on Earth find the data
warrant backtracking. This is a suboptimal use of resources even on relatively close targets such as the Moon or
Mars. The farther mankind ventures into space, the longer the delay in communication, due to which interesting
findings from data sent back to Earth are made too late to command a (roving, floating, or orbiting) robot to
further examine a given location. However, autonomous commanding of robots in scientific exploration can only
be as reliable as the scientific information extracted from the data that is collected and provided for decision
making. In this paper, we focus on the discovery scenario, where information extraction is accomplished with
unsupervised clustering. For high-dimensional data with complicated structure, detailed segmentation that
identifies all significant groups and discovers the small, surprising anomalies in the data, is a challenging task
at which conventional algorithms often fail. We approach the problem with precision manifold learning using
self-organizing neural maps with non-standard features developed in the course of our research. We demonstrate
the effectiveness and robustness of this approach on multi-spectral imagery from the Mars Exploration Rovers
Pancam, and on synthetic hyperspectral imagery.
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