Could Windbots be the answer? ( NASA Looking into New Concept of Space and Planetary Exploration)

NASA is experimenting with a notion for robotic gliding devices that could cruise in the atmospheres of other planets, including gas giants like Jupiter. These robotic devices will not have wings nor hot-air balloons to stay aloft. NASA are flirting with the idea of using air turbulence to produce influence to make the floating robots stay airborne. The airborne devices are to be called Windbots.

These new type of robotic probes might be something like space travelling Cubsats, but these particular Windbots will be designed to remain within the fringes of a planet’s stratosphere. This will enable all sorts of exploration and monitoring of planetary gases, gravity and so many other things.

Plants that Gas giants lie Jupiter and Saturn have no solid floor upon which to land and sometimes the gravity getting closer to the core would be enormous. This would crush most types of probe that descend too close to the inner regions of such planets.

NASA’s scientists are looking at things like certain plant seeds that start to rotate when they fall, thus creating lift and allowing the seed to stay airborne for long periods at a time. Such natural designs could be used on windbots. Finding a consistent and light source of energy seems paramount. For this; planetary winds, temperature change and planetary magnetic pull could be used. Maybe small copters with rudders or something akin to a fly.

Even planets like Venus might benefit from Windbots because the surface is too hot and trapped under cloud cover. One might imagine small windbots or even larger manned ones too. Perhaps windbot fleets on some planets with stations high in the sky.

Alien Atmospheres – Methane, CFCs and Signs of Extraterrestiel Life.

Scientists are developing all sorts of ways to work out if distant stars have planets in orbit. Then they can also work out if there are worlds within the Goldilocks zone of the star system (the just right area) Not too hot or too cold. Now they can also work out if the planet of observation has an atmosphere. To learn more read the report below from Astrobiology Magazine


Alien Atmospheres – Methane, CFCs and Signs of Extraterrestrial “Intelligence” | Astrobiology Magazine

European Space Agency's Idea for a Quadcopter on Martian Surface

The European Space Agency is coming up with a large number of projects. I find many of the theories interesting, but being pessimistic; I wonder how far any of these things get in real terms. Once beyond the drawing board or if they get beyond.

It would be wonderful to see the ESA get some meaningful projects together and witness a mission to Mars with the proposed Quadcopter. I read this article in IEEE Spectrum magazine.

This is an article downloaded form IEEE Spectrum - an online magazine about space exploration. 

By Evan Ackerman

Posted 7 Jul 2014 | 16:20 GMT

The most ludicrous way of getting a robot to the surface of Mars is maybe stuffing it inside a giant inflatable bouncy ball and dropping it from a parachute. And that is only slightly more ludicrous than attaching it to a rocket-powered hovercrane (a rocket-powered hovercrane!!!) and thenlowering it to the ground with some sort of ridiculous cable contraption.

NASA has done both of these things. Successfully.

So, the bar is very high for finding ludicrous ways of getting robots to the surface of Mars, and the European Space Agency (ESA) has taken on the challenge with a quadcopter that can safely drop a rover down onto the Martian surface while hovering.

This is a combination of navigation software and hardware (GPS plus inertial systems, followed by vision-based navigation, a laser range finder, and a barometer), and visual hazard avoidance: the quadcopter is actively avoiding perceived obstacles (big pointy rocks and such) to find a nice, clear, flat, happy place to set down its rover cargo, using a 5-meter-long bridle.

You can think of this system as a combination of NASA's Morpheus lander, which has autonomous obstacle avoidance for landing site selection:

And this system from Japan, which is designed to deploy small rovers into (or next to) volcanoes:

Now, no matter what the ESA says in its press release, we don't want you to get the idea that this thing is now ready to fly off to Mars, rover in tow. There's a reason that NASA went with rockets and not rotors. I mean, there are probably lots of reasons, but one of them is that Mars doesn't have much atmosphere: the pressure at "sea level" on Mars (which is the average radius of the planet, Mars not currently being in possession of any seas) is about one-hundredth the atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth.

And since things like helicopters depend on thrusting air downward to keep themselves up, you're going to need some ludicrously long blades (or a huge number of small ones) to physically move enough atmosphere to remain airborne. The reduced gravity (a little over a third of that on Earth) will help substantially, but it's still not a proven approach. This page from Georgia Techprovides more detail on how bad of an idea this is, and suggests flapping wings as a substitute (although I think it's research from 2001-ish).

What's most relevant here is the software that the team developed to navigate and detect hazards, because it can (presumably) be adapted to other flying platforms, like rocket cranes, or something more exotic, like maybe something based on a balloon. Or an anti-gravity hovership. The ESA has those, right?