The XO Directory

NASA Robot, Senseta MAX 5.0A, solves a 19-year-old murder mystery of Dawn Sanchez.

It happened in 1991 when Bernado Bass killed Dawn Sanchez. Her body and the murder gun was never discovered during the investigation. Bass' car, in which Sanchez was last seen, was also missing which resulted to the dismissal of the case in 1991 due to lack of evidence.

The case was recently reopened when an informant told the authorities that the car may have been disassembled and buried in a large abandoned lot in Alviso. The exact location in the lot was not specified, and the cost to excavate the entire area was too high. Enter Senseta MAX 5.0A, a rover outfitted with a Geometrics G-858 magnetometer. Based on data gathered by the robot, the county excavated the site and retrieved car parts that matched the suspect’s car. On August 29, 2009, Bass pleaded no contest to the charges and was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison.

Carnegie Mellon Innovations Lab (CMIL) in collaboration with the NASA Payload Directed Flight research team from the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames, and the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., assisted the County of Santa Clara’s District Attorney’s Office in solving a 1991 cold case murder investigation. The team deployed a Senseta MAX 5.0A Rover, an autonomous ground vehicle, to perform magnetic surveys of a vacant lot in Alviso, Calif., looking for buried material evidence, which included car parts and a possible body buried in the old junk yard.

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