The abandoned oil town of half a century is protected by aerial modeling, and the most Mars like unmanned area on Earth sends out distress signals. Campsite | Mars | Half a Century

Heading west, passing through both wind and rain. I landed at Xining Airport in Qinghai, got on a bus, had a boxed meal, and rushed to Lenghu Town, Mangya City, 1000 kilometers away without stopping. When passing through the northern edge of the Qaidam Basin on the Qinghai Tibet Plateau, the driver pointed at the Yadan landform, which was like a group of whales going out to sea, and told the Liberation Daily Shangguan News reporter, "That place is called the 'South Eight Immortals'. In the 1950s, eight female geological exploration team members from the south came here to search for oil, but all went missing and sacrificed themselves."

Now, on the wind eroded Gobi at an altitude of 3000 meters, a group of young people from more than ten departments including the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, as well as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, have teamed up to carry out the "Global Challenge Plan - Beidou Exploring Qinggan" summer social practice, once again standing on the "Yadan" in the northwest - a small hill with steep walls in the national language.

Wind and sun, flying sand and rocks, temperature differences between day and night, and even altitude sickness, many of them use paper towels to stuff their noses and operate new tools from the BeiDou terminal to unmanned aerial vehicles, completing a series of tasks such as positioning, surveying, and modeling, and also experiencing the spirit of explorers and entrepreneurs.

Unmanned Town

Two industrial sites for aerial surveys

The Altai Mountains at an altitude of 5800 meters are covered in white snow all year round, and when flipped over, it becomes Gansu. At the foot of the mountain, in the desolate desert, there were large pieces of debris. The team members found the once prosperous and long lost town - the No. 5 Oilfield Base in the former Lenghu City. From uninhabited areas to a population of 100000, ambitious young people from all over the world, carrying the ideal and ambition of "I contribute oil to our country", shed their blood and youth here more than half a century ago. However, in the thirty years of Hedong and Hexi, with the gradual depletion of oil resources, oil mines have entered a low development valley year by year, with an annual production of 300000 tons of crude oil. The oil town is also deserted, with all buildings reduced to ruins due to wind and sand erosion.

Has the Cold Lake Site been forgotten? "Today, we were able to drive our own car, fill up our own gas, and come and see the beautiful scenery, thanks to the rivers and mountains they built back then." A middle-aged couple who drove from Beijing made a special visit to this place, and their exclamation moved the leader of the first group of the practical team and the descendants of the design college. Tian Cairang, Deputy Secretary of the Party Group of the Management Committee of the Cold Lake Science and Technology Innovation Industrial Park, also told college students that this unmanned town is a natural witness to the history of western construction and is planning to be converted into a "Museum of Chinese Entrepreneurship Spirit" in its original state.

The small team devoutly placed a stone in front of the monument, and the pilot released the drone. They use unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) surveying methods, as well as advanced 3D computer vision and point cloud data processing technology, to integrate surface details with aerial views. Through high-precision digital geographic information models, they plan to accurately capture and preserve the full picture of petroleum industry relics. However, during the long journey, factors such as software incompatibility, insufficient batteries, lack of proficiency in flight technology, and difficulty in selecting mapping areas made the first survey very difficult.

The next day, they drove on the dirt road for another hour or two, "turning back" and then challenged themselves again by brushing the original site. From the still distinguishable auditorium in the town to Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, drones shuttle between dangerous buildings, using the optimal route to record as much data information as possible. The technical team worked together to complete the 3D reconstruction, and the complete ruins of the town were preserved digitally forever. Looking at the bird's-eye surveying and mapping maps one by one, they became Sun's best birthday gift during her practical experience.

Drones

Scanned "Mars" missing and rescued

Cold Lake area is now transforming from an oil town to a science innovation town, a science fiction town, and a science popularization town. It is making use of its unique geographical and climatic conditions to build the largest astronomical observation base in Asia. It has introduced nine projects, including the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Zijin Mountain Observatory, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Nanda University, and Shanghai Jiaotong University. More than 30 telescopes of different bands are being built and installed in each mountain at an altitude of more than 4000 meters.

Looking up at the starry sky and naked at the Milky Way; Down to earth, the Martian landscape. "After two days and one night on the road, we finally arrived at 'Mars'. As a representative landmark, the container barracks and capsule style sleeping pods of the Cold Lake Mars Camp welcomed the entire team of the' International Practice Camp for UAV Surveying and Rescue in the Northwest Unmanned Area '.". As far as the eye can see, under the setting sun in the desert, Obo Liang Yadan turns even redder, and the ground is covered with sparkling layered rocks, truly making it "the most Martian like place on Earth.".

Driving over 2000 kilometers deep into the cold lake, "Beidou explores Qinggan", and more than ten departments of Shanghai Jiao Tong University form teams for summer social practice

The task has come again. The eighth team member of the fourth group, led by Ying Chao, a doctoral student from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, began conducting aerial surveying and Beidou high-precision positioning service verification of the terrain on the side of the Oboliang Ridge. They did their homework, designed a concave shaped drone flight route, and implemented autonomous cruise surveying. Due to the need for multiple repeated flights for precise scanning, the first four flights were all very smooth; However, during the fifth launch, the drone suddenly lost contact for unknown reasons. Neither without electricity nor strong winds, pilots such as Xiao Yingchao and Shi Tingyuan were at a loss.

Unexpectedly, on the mysterious surface of Mars, people did not disappear, but planes went missing first. Emergency response of the entire team, based on the longitude and latitude coordinates provided by the drone, led by Li Shuyi and others from the Aerospace Academy, crossed the desert hills in a northwest direction and conducted search and rescue within a radius of one or two kilometers. However, during the half day semi-circular search circle, the white drone was never found.

They reconsidered and considered that the drone software version was relatively low and was also hindered by GPS signals. Perhaps it terminated the "concave" shaped established route and instead flew inertia along an extended line until it lost power before landing? So, Xiao Yingchao and Shao Zhiming from the School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering divided into two parallel paths in the northeast direction, basically searching in a straight line. Hard work pays off for those who are willing. Below Yadan, two kilometers away from the entrance of the campsite, the drone that landed smoothly was rescued. There is no danger, and the data is intact.

[Unmanned Area]

Decoding "Beidou" short messages

With the visit of Liu Cixin, a judge of the Cold Lake Science Fiction Literature Award, and others, tourists from other provinces have also come to this barren land in recent years, adding popularity. However, according to a reporter from Jiefang Daily's Shangguan News, even various scientific researchers who rely solely on solar energy in this base station and leave the unmanned area without signal at the campsite are prone to getting lost or even getting lost. Therefore, "preventing loss" has become the safety bottom line for the development of cultural tourism, and the high coverage of the "Beidou" navigation system has also come into play.

So, undergraduate students from the Aerospace Academy, including Ning Chenzhang, carried Beidou handheld terminals with "SOS" buttons and found the best experimental field for Beidou's unique short message communication, especially emergency calls. Like other passersby undergoing the test, the Jiefang Daily Shangguan News reporter also picked up this pager, BP-sized terminal, and experimentally entered a "text message" on a Bluetooth connected mobile phone: "Mars Base Test Beidou" to see if the system backend located at the campsite could receive this short message. As the saying goes, it is easy to know but difficult to act. The short message format is a hexadecimal string. He and his friends worked continuously until early morning, matching the messages each person tried to send on that day one by one, completing the decoding and displaying them in Chinese.

Within 3 days of stationed at the Mars camp, their team ran outside the coverage area of the base station to test the short message performance, which lasted for a total of 7912 seconds. The data shows that the average delay of "Beidou SMS" is 0.54 seconds, and the delay in "challenging environment" is 0.81 seconds. In terms of location availability, the availability ratio of Beidou short messages in all scenarios of unmanned areas is close to 70%. The night before, Vice Dean of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhan Xingqun, stood in the lobby of the hotel with his classmates, brainstorming for two hours to explore the application of Beidou, such as short messages, and expanding wireless scenarios without ground mobile communication base stations.

Regarding this, Chen Yongxiang, Secretary of the Party Group and Director of the Qinghai Provincial Department of Science and Technology, who happened to come to the Mars campsite for inspection, also took over the terminal and asked about the principle in detail, exchanged and interacted with Shanghai university students, and praised them. When he saw his classmates using power banks to power up the Beidou terminal, he also proposed a "golden idea" tailored to local conditions, hoping that the terminal could consider solar energy function and still be able to locate and guide rescue even under the extreme condition of losing any power in consecutive days.