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Sending nanobots to the Red Planet NASA's Curiosity rover, scheduled to reach the red planet this month, is the size of an SUV for good reason: It's built to carry 165 pounds of scientific instruments over boulders and into gullies. But putting Hummer-size robots on other planets is not altogether practical. For one, it's expensive. (Getting a Curiosity-weight rover to Mars takes more than a million pounds of fuel.) Large rovers are also power-hungry and limited in range. For future missions, some researchers, eager to do more science with fewer resources, have begun looking to nanobots-each one about one-one-billionth as big as Curiosity.
The first nanobots to reach Mars could arrive as a cloud of "smart dust"-sand-grain-size robots that travel like a sand storm, using the Martian wind for propulsion. An orbiting spacecraft would drop a capsule of the dust motes onto the planet. From there, they would take advantage of Mars's low gravity (38 percent of Earth's) to ride the thin Martian winds. John Barker, a physicist at the University of Glasgow, says that according to his computer simulations, one release of 30,000 robots could cover thousands of square miles. Each robot would contain a nanoprocessor, an antenna for communicating with neighboring motes, a sensor for collecting data and an electrode-controlled shape-shifting polymer shell. Once on the ground, the motes would decide which would change from a smooth exterior to a dimpled silhouette that creates drag to help them catch the wind and travel. The motes would use their sensors to collect data about Mars's air currents and chemical composition and then communicate this information to the orbiter, which would relay that data back to Earth. The project might sound impossibly complex, but shape-shifting polymers already exist in the lab, and Barker has started testing the most challenging part of the concept-the communications array-with centimeter-size prototypes.
Red Rovers: Tiny walking robots could gather information about Mars and other planets. Courtesy NASA
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The first nanobots to reach Mars could arrive as a cloud of "smart dust"-sand-grain-size robots that travel like a sand storm, using the Martian wind for propulsion. An orbiting spacecraft would drop a capsule of the dust motes onto the planet. From there, they would take advantage of Mars's low gravity (38 percent of Earth's) to ride the thin Martian winds. John Barker, a physicist at the University of Glasgow, says that according to his computer simulations, one release of 30,000 robots could cover thousands of square miles. Each robot would contain a nanoprocessor, an antenna for communicating with neighboring motes, a sensor for collecting data and an electrode-controlled shape-shifting polymer shell. Once on the ground, the motes would decide which would change from a smooth exterior to a dimpled silhouette that creates drag to help them catch the wind and travel. The motes would use their sensors to collect data about Mars's air currents and chemical composition and then communicate this information to the orbiter, which would relay that data back to Earth. The project might sound impossibly complex, but shape-shifting polymers already exist in the lab, and Barker has started testing the most challenging part of the concept-the communications array-with centimeter-size prototypes.
Red Rovers: Tiny walking robots could gather information about Mars and other planets. Courtesy NASAMore...