A Dragonfly For Mars
Oct 01, 2008 0835 hrs IST
Wing-flapping bot will act as guide for Mars Rovers
The best way to survey a new land, it might be obvious, is to take to the skies. So while the Mars rovers are doing a bang-up job of exploring the planet's surface, they wouldn't be as effective as an aircraft. Researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands clearly understand this, which is why they've developed ExoFly, a dragonfly-like robot that could fly around Mars and point the rovers to areas that may be worth exploring more.
Dragonfly robots aren't exactly a new idea -- it is said that the CIA started work on a spy-bot based on the design as far back as the 1970s. There are, however, special considerations to be made with a robot that's supposed to fly on Mars--the most important being that the atmosphere is very thin, so the bot's wings have to be larger and flap faster than your average insect-bot.
If this takes off (pun intended), the researchers envision a situation where the ExoFly could be customized to suit the planet (or planetoid or moon or comet) it's intended for.
Source: NewScientist
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