Validate Passive Cave Mapping for Mars Missions

EchoQuilt produces planetary-grade 3D quilts of lava tubes inside Mars-rover power and bandwidth envelopes using only passive sound and motion — no active sensors, no continuous uplink.

A Mars sample-return concept calls for a rover to characterize a sixty-meter skylight and the lava tube below it on a fourteen-watt power envelope, with eight kilobits of telemetry per hour on a shared Deep Space Network allocation. Active LiDAR is out. Structured-light cameras are out. Flash photography is out. The mission needs flight-traceable proof that ambient seismic and rover-motion data alone can produce a survey-grade tube interior map. EchoQuilt is deployed in Hawaiian and Icelandic lava tubes as the terrestrial analog: same power budget, same bandwidth ceiling, same sensor suite the flight hardware will carry. Each ground campaign feeds quilts back to JPL and ESA mission planners as direct evidence the technique scales to a planetary mission.