"Smart Dust" to Explore Planets

Ollabelle writes "The BBC is reporting how tiny chips with flexible skins could be used to glide through a planet's atmosphere in swarms to gather data and report back. 'The idea of using millimetre-sized devices to explore far-flung locations is nothing new, but Dr Barker and his colleagues are starting to look in detail at how it might be achieved. The professor at Glasgow's Nanoelectronics Research Centre told delegates at the Royal Astronomical Society gathering that computer chips of the size and sophistication required to meet the challenge already existed.'"

Comments

We can't be content just polluting our own planet?

[KWTm]

So, not being satisfied with having our waste strewn across just our own planet, now we're going to introduce the rest of the solar system to our All-Products-Are-Disposable culture? Or are these micro chip/probes going to clean up after themselves and come back to Earth?

Re:Micro-rovers

[Tablizer]

Maybe because it costs so damn much to get a payload to Mars, you might as well send a payload that's going to pay back.

Why would 12 microrovers cost more than one big rover? (The next one under preparation is much bigger than even Spirit.)

Sojourner was only designed to last 7 days; and even after 83 days it had only traveled 100 meters.

I meant Sojourner-sized, not Sojourner technology. Sojourner relied on a separate lander to send messages back, and thus couldn't wonder far. We don't need that. I am thinking that microprobes could do without a contact spectrometer. Use only remote-sensing spectrometers. That way more weight can be devoted to orbiter communications.

You need a big vehicle with big wheels or tracks and a complex suspension system to navigate around a rock-strewn plain

Only if you want to go relatively fast and fear fatal mistakes. If a microrover gets stuck or scratched, it gets stuck or scratched. The slowness of Spirit and Oppy is largey due to risk aversion.

I am not against larger rovers, only saying we need both types. One large rover and a batch of 12 micro-rovers would probably be more scientifically useful than 2 big rovers because a bunch can survey more diverse areas of Mars.

battery

[dominious]

I wonder if the demand for collecting and distributing data in real time would be feasible with such small
batteries. Battery lifetime is a challenge itself for smart dust, what happens when the application requires
data to be transmitted all the time in order to monitor changes constatly, how long would the nodes last? In
battlefields there's no need to transmit data unless something happens, like an explosion will trigger an event.

Anyhow, this is a great idea and makes a very good project!

Attribution?!

[tcmoore4]

Kris Pister, an EECS professor in MEMS at Berkeley, coined the term "Smart Dust" and has done a ton of work on it. I remember him mentioning the goals of the project in a class in 1999, and he touched upon all the accomplishments mentioned in the article, most of which were achieved. If you search on "Smart Dust" in Google, his research project site is the first that comes up. So how can their be no mention of Pister, his research, his company "Dust Networks", or Berkeley in the entire article? http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDus t/ Just wondering.

Re:Attribution?!

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Invincible", a 1960's novel by noted SF author Stanislaw Lem explores on something suprisingly similar, although self-organizing arrays of micro-robots are a result of natural cyber-evolution there, in fact they "devolved" from highly advanced macro robots which survived the end of a distant civilization due to a supernova's explosion.