Mars Rover: Tumbleweed Models

An anonymous reader writes "A North Carolina State project has prototyped a wind-blown Mars exploration rover. It draws its inspiration from the lowly tumbleweed, to cover large distances with low-power requirements. For collecting atmospheric, thermal or geological samples across great distances, the 'single-wheel' tumbleweed has some advantages over the usual four-wheeling approach to tough terrain."

Comments

Re:How do they steer?

[Timesprout]

I dont think steering is an issue with this sort of project. Its simply to collect data from as many wide ranging sources as possible for trend analysis at a later point as opposed to the majority of past/current efforts which can only focus on a few square metres of the planets surface. I imagine they dont really care where it goes if it broadens the sample pool.

Re:How do they steer?

[porksodas]

A possible explanation may be that they don't want to steer. A device this simple, and with these kinds of power requirements, may be deployed on a far larger scale than a single, expensive explorer-cart. They might not be able to provide positional data, but that may well be compensated by their range and numbers. Imagine hundred of these rolling around Mars, for a year or so, continually transmitting usefull measurements... Besides : they might be able to detect their positions from down here - most likely not as accurate as GPS, but still...