This will help improve the quality of the study.
A whole swarm of robots could land on Mars in the foreseeable future. This concept of exploring the Red Planet was put forward by a group of researchers from the Skoltech Laboratory for Intelligent Space Robotics.
As conceived by the developers of a new approach to Martian robotics, a group of small two-wheeled robots will be more efficient than one six-wheeled one.
This is explained by the fact that, firstly, the principle of cooperative work will allow collecting more information about the history of the planet, its atmosphere, the presence of traces of life and water. Secondly, the modular design will significantly increase the time of active work on Mars. Thirdly, at some point, if it is necessary to work with large fragments of the Martian soil, the “swarm” can come together again. By the way, he can do it in different combinations.
According to Skoltech Associate Professor Dmitry Teteryukov, the NASA experience shows that the scheme of working on Mars with the help of divided vehicles works more successfully than the old one. The agency sent an Ingenuity helicopter along with the Perseverance rover in 2020. “An unmanned helicopter, with its high speed and the ability to view space from a height, allows you to plan the movement of a slow-moving mobile robot,” says Teteryukov.
So, a set of two-wheeled robots, each of which carries its own instrument on board – for example, a georadar, or a spectrometer, or sampling equipment, can be more efficient than a heavy rover due to the greater total coverage of the territory by all four rovers.
The solution also assumes that even if three robots fail, the last one, the fourth one, will be able to continue to perform part of the research tasks alone, transmitting information to Earth. Thus, the time of the complete completion of the mission can be delayed by many years.
Why are scientists still sending extremely heavy six-wheeled vehicles to Mars?
Comment by Maxim MOKROUSOV, Head of the Laboratory of Nuclear Physical Instruments of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences:
Any rover needs electricity and heat to survive on Mars. At one time, we considered a thermal model for a small rover and came to the conclusion that it could not survive the night on a cold planet, to which we attribute Mars. Cooling down to minus 100-odd degrees will not allow his systems to work normally. The thing is that a radioisotope heat generator based on Russian plutonium is installed on large rovers to generate energy and heat (by the way, such a “heater”, by the way, is also on the American Curiosity rover). No one seriously calculated the profitability of installing such sources for each small fragment of the “swarm”, most likely due to the fact that the price of one such “baby” with plutonium will jump sharply.
Newspaper headline:
One robot is good, but four is better