Insect Robots For Mars Exploration

destructor writes "Thanks to these guys, I found this little robotic article. Aided by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts, flying insect robots are looking at a life on our "little red planet", Mars in order to procure some atmospheric information and samples. Since conventional aircraft are unable to precisely navigate the Mars surface due to very thin air qualities, the robots actually have the ability to "move only their wings rapidly - while the body flies slowly", to ease sample collections." Space.com is carrying a piece on this.

Comments

Re:Wonder if they will try it here first

[chinton]

So they build a vacuum chamber, pump out Earth's atmosphere, and pump in the equivalent Martian atmosphere and pressure.

Simulating Martian gravity is another thing...

This seems too complicated

[JMZero]

I liked thetumbleweed idea a lot more, though it's not so sexy. It seems like the odds of mechanical/electrical failures on a flyer are greater than the odds of our tumbleweed falling in a hole.

before we explore mars

[perdida]

we had better work out who owns it, etc.

The U.S. and the Russians are arguing over the I.S.S. already. This is why the Russians would not send up their cargo module.

It's gotten beyond the point of treaties for international peace saying "we all own space." No nation will go into space, and neither will any company go there, without some way of deriving profit.

Before anyone sets a toe down anywhere in the name of anything, let's figure this out.

Small mass leads to low damage

[Christopher B. Brown]

We have come to understand with great vigor this fall that when large aircraft come down unexpectedly, this leads to very bad things.

The same is not true for smaller craft.

If a 747 "prangs" on landing, there are likely to be people injured or killed. On the other hand, smaller aircraft take hard landings rather a lot better.

Taking it to a more significant extreme, I used to fly radio controlled planes. The five pound 5 foot wingspan planes could take a pretty hard landing without damage. Move to an 8 footer weighing 15 pounds, and the plane is much more fragile.

Taking it in the other direction, it's probably impossible to kill an ant by dropping it from high altitude; there's not enough density for the terminal velocity to be too terribly high, and there's not enough mass for there to be much of an impact.

A "flying robot" is liable to be a bit bigger than an ant, but it's certainly down there in the "small scale" category. If it's made of tough materials, it should be quite resilient.

Re:Wonder if they will try it here first

[SubtleNuance]

they build a vacuum chamber, pump out Earth's atmosphere, and pump in the equivalent Martian atmosphere and pressure.

So you want to fly in a Mars-like atmosphere with Terran gravity?

Please see here: http://www.mste.uiuc.edu/davea/aviation/bernoulliP rinciple.html

Sorta stupid when you think about it.

[Bowie J. Poag]

This sounds more like a "Lets build an unorthodox. unusual and attention-getting device so we can attract supporters for the idea!" concept rather than a truly practical and realistic one. Sounds like a varitable CueCat of Mars exploration.

Being able to navigate in a particular direction isn't the issue. There are solutions to the navigation problem that are far cheaper, and yeild far better results than "insect robots". For example:

Balloons. Whats wrong with having a computer-controlled balloon with a cannister of hydrogen or helium beneath it? As local temperature and air pressure change, the computer could inflate or deflate accordingly. Toss in a good altimeter, and you can drift across the surface within a few feet for months on end. A small armada of these could cover a very wide area in a relatively short amount of time. It requires no propulsion, it will never run out of fuel, its a simple device that by its very design lessens the risk of mechanical failure, and its extremely cheap to produce and deploy.

If not balloons, why not use spring-loaded "grasshoppers" ? Essentially big wind-up toys, you can deploy thousands of these on the surface. They dont require intelligence, they dont consume fuel, and they dont require supervision of any sort. They simply pop around the surface taking photographs both on the ground and in the air, and when their spring begins to run low, they use the remainder of the spring's potential energy to broadcast the pictures and atmospheric data they recorded during their lifespan of hopping around Mars for a few weeks. Both of these ideas make sense, because when used in large groups, you can map enormous areas of terrain fairly well, like sending out guys in every direction at the beginning of a game of Command & Conquer. Once all the balloons (or grasshoppers) collect all their data, you can decide an interesting path for any subsequent rover to take.

I think this guy fails to realize that the more complicated his device becomes, the more risks of failure you encounter, the higher the pricetag becomes, and the more problems you'll have no way of addressing. As the old saying goes, "Keep it simple, stupid!". Sure, brainless observers & reporters arent nearly as glamorous as FLYING ROBOT INSECTS, but Mars exploration isnt about being able to license the design to Matchbox to sell miniatures of your invention to kids. Its about getting the job done as cheaply and reliably as possible.

Cheers,

Airships

[shpoffo]

I still have not heard a good arguement for why airships are not used in this scenario. Most of the volume/weight is acquired on-location making transport cheaper/easier and the skin of the ballon could be made of a photo-voltaic substance that could harvest light for operation.

-shpoffo

Make Mars an Online Game

[Tenebrious1]

We're used to lag... so what's 15 minutes?

To pay for the exploration, let people buy the bugs. We control them, give them commands on where to go, what to do. Like any online game, you build clans and alliances, then wage war on other armies. Ok, maybe it wouldn't be good to be able to PK (or BK) other bugs since it's not easy to replace them and I suppose they won't be too cheap. Have some sort of power modules dropped around where our bugs can automatically home in on when they're low on energy, or just drop them ahead of the advancing army of bugs.

I bet within a year we'd have all of Mars explored.

biomology or something

[Anonymous Coward]

The term Entomopter combines the concept of an insect (ento) with segmented wings (mopter).

Of course it's only to be expected of a website called "Cosmiverse" but these guys are awful at philology.

For the record: Wing is "pter" - pterodactyl means "wing finger", helicopter means "helical wing". The "entom" means insect - "en" means "in" and "tom" means "cut". ("Tom" also features in the word "atom", which means uncuttable.)

Insects are so called ("in" = "in", "sect" = cut, as in section) because they are segmented.

The "o" in the middle is just linguistic glue to stick the word together.