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American National Space Agency doesn’t seem to going to abandon his idea to equip a full-fledged mission to the red planet.
Now NASA officials said that before flying to Mars first you need to conduct a thorough reconnaissance in the distant heaven the body. Of course, reconnaissance vehicles are already doing this. like the Curiosity rover, but American scientists need a completely different research tool. And it looks like they already found suitable option.
NASA scientists say they’ve started developing special robots, which will look like large bees. These “Mars Bees” like them called by the authors of the project, will become thousands of eyes that will inspect everything nooks and crannies of the red planet.
A spokesman for Chang Kwon Kang said that one of the rovers will deliver to Mars a huge swarm of such mini-robots, and “Mars bees” scatter across the Red Planet in all directions. They are will be able to penetrate into various, even the most inaccessible places like caves and cracks in the rocks.
The wingspan of the Mars bees will be about 5 centimeters. They will periodically return during the mission to to the rover to recharge from it. Every mini robot will equipped with a camera, as well as various sensors for analyzing the composition atmosphere and soil. Flying a day or two, an artificial insect will transmit the received data to the rover, which in turn will send all this wealth of photo and video materials to The earth.
Help the Americans in this project will be Japanese robotic engineers with experience in creating miniature flying cars. Together, experts intend to achieve extremely simple and robust design of the Mars bees.
Someone will ask a completely logical question: why not send to Mars ordinary drones and multicopters? The answer is quite simple: the point is that Martian atmospheric pressure is 110 times less than Earth’s, therefore, large aircraft will not work well there. Than less mass of the device, the easier it will fly to this far not earthly atmosphere. So the idea of NASA scientists is quite reasonable, tempting and real.
NASA Mars Bees Robots
