Photo: Marco Pavone
We have been sending stuff to Mars ever since the 1960s, but despite the fact decades have passed since, we don’t have much to show for. Only now that the Perseverance rover and its army of instruments are on-site that we are beginning to make huge steps toward better understanding a planet that may very well become humanity’s second home.
Estimates are that we’ve covered less than one percent of the Martian surface so far, which pretty much amounts to us doing nothing, really. We don’t even know for a fact, for instance, if there are caves on the Red Planet. But that doesn’t stop people from coming up with crazy concepts meant to explore these locations once we stumble upon them.
One such project comes from Stanford University’s Marco Pavone, who designed something called ReachBot: a small machine capable of crawling inside tight spaces and anchoring itself to whatever rocks walls it finds to perform its mission better.
The thing was envisioned with rollable, extendable, and reconfigurable booms that also fulfill the role of manipulator arms. Using them, it should be capable of operating in “traditionally difficult environments, like vertical cliff walls or the rocky and uneven floors of caves on Mars.”
That would allow Earth-based scientists access to otherwise inaccessible areas, including "Noachian targets on Mars that contain ancient material preserved in strata in the form of cliff-face fractures and sublimation pits."
The ReachBot project is backed by NASA through the Phase I of the Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. Like all the others included here, it is in the early stages, and a lot of work needs to be done before the team can come up with a working prototype.
Even if that happens, NASA warns, there is no guarantee the ReachBot will ever be part of an official mission.
One such project comes from Stanford University’s Marco Pavone, who designed something called ReachBot: a small machine capable of crawling inside tight spaces and anchoring itself to whatever rocks walls it finds to perform its mission better.
The thing was envisioned with rollable, extendable, and reconfigurable booms that also fulfill the role of manipulator arms. Using them, it should be capable of operating in “traditionally difficult environments, like vertical cliff walls or the rocky and uneven floors of caves on Mars.”
That would allow Earth-based scientists access to otherwise inaccessible areas, including "Noachian targets on Mars that contain ancient material preserved in strata in the form of cliff-face fractures and sublimation pits."
The ReachBot project is backed by NASA through the Phase I of the Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. Like all the others included here, it is in the early stages, and a lot of work needs to be done before the team can come up with a working prototype.
Even if that happens, NASA warns, there is no guarantee the ReachBot will ever be part of an official mission.
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