Title: The Fog of War: A Machine Learning Approach to Forecasting Weather on Mars,
Abstract: For over a decade, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have
been recording measurements from the Martian surface as a part of the Mars
Exploration Rovers mission. One quantity of interest has been the opacity of
Mars's atmosphere for its importance in day-to-day estimations of the amount of
power available to the rover from its solar arrays. This paper proposes the use
of neural networks as a method for forecasting Martian atmospheric opacity that
is more effective than the current empirical model. The more accurate
prediction provided by these networks would allow operators at JPL to make more
accurate predictions of the amount of energy available to the rover when they
plan activities for coming sols.