Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Bouncing ball probes for Mars
"MIT researchers are developing an approach to Mars exploration that sits right at the intersection of our forecasts about light infrastructure and sensory transformation. The idea is that thousands of baseball-sized probes containing an array of environmental sensors and a fuel cell would be dumped out on the surface of the planet.
"They would start to hop, bounce and roll and distribute themselves across the surface of the planet, exploring as they go, taking scientific data samples," said Steven Dubowsky, the director of MIT's Field and Space Robotics Laboratory.
The probes' size makes them perfect advance scouts for the planet's lava tubes where water may still exist. As the probes explore, they'd talk their nearest neighbors over a wireless LAN with the data eventually making its way to a base station for transmission back to Earth. From the MIT News Office:
One of the major advantages of the mini probes is that losing a few out of hundreds or thousands of probes sent into a treacherous area would not derail the overall mission, Dubowsky said. "You would certainly be willing to sacrifice some of these 1,000 balls" to gather information from remote areas, he said.
Each probe would weigh about 100 grams (4 ounces) and would carry its own tiny fuel cell. "You could hop for a long, long time on a few grams of fuel," Dubowsky said.
Artificial muscles inside the probes could make them hop an average of six times per hour, with a maximum rate of 60 hops per hour. The devices would travel about 1.5 meters per hop; they can also bounce or roll. In 30 days, a swarm of probes could cover 50 square miles, according to Dubowsky.