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  • [♪ INTRO]

  • The vanguard of space exploration is the rover.

  • Well, orbiters and landers too, but rovers are especially useful.

  • They can rove around and do science for us on the ground!

  • They sing happy birthday to themselves!

  • They're just great.

  • We've roved a bunch on the Moon and Mars,

  • so we've got a lot of experience designing awesome science bots,

  • but as we expand our exploration to other bodies in the solar system,

  • we've gotta make sure we have the right bot for the job.

  • This is part of why NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC, exists.

  • The program's goal is to develop creative technologies that can have applications for future missions,

  • even though the original projects themselves may not make it to space.

  • None of the rovers we're going to talk about today are slated to fly any time soon.

  • But they provide all kinds of creative solutions to the problem of navigating new terrain.

  • Imagine, for instance, putting a Mars rover on Saturn's moon Titan.

  • Titan is so cold that methane and ethane, which are usually gases on Earth,

  • are liquids there.

  • And it's got lots of methane and ethane, so it's super wet,

  • with tons of lakes and rain made out of the stuff.

  • The Spirit rover got stuck in soft Martian soil in 2009,

  • imagine what would happen to it on Titan!

  • The Super Ball Bot is designed to solve that problem.

  • The bot is a NIAC project developed by the engineers at

  • NASA's Ames Research Center in California.

  • And it's totally different from any rover we've ever deployed,

  • it looks more like a space-age tumbleweed.

  • It's made up of a network of springy bars that form a kind of sphere,

  • with its science payload sitting in the middle.

  • The bars give Super Ball Bot a property known as tensegrity in physics.

  • Tension elements like springs connect the more solid parts like bars

  • in a way that give the machine its structural integrity.

  • Incorporating tensegrity into your design means you get a really rugged bot.

  • It can take lots of impact, distributing those impact forces to protect its payload.

  • Super Ball Bot moves by rolling around, and can climb up and down hills easily.

  • And because it's quasi-spherical and lightweight, it can distribute its mass over a large surface area,

  • which helps keep it from getting stuck in the mud.

  • So it would be a great rover for a place like Titan, which is all kinds of hilly and muddy!

  • Super Ball Bot seems to have wrapped up development in 2015,

  • but now that we know a tumbling rover can work,

  • we could end up using the technology in future missions.

  • Titan isn't the only place in the solar system with weird weather, though.

  • There's also Venus.

  • The planet's atmosphere has crushingly high pressures, is made of acid, and can melt lead.

  • So obviously we super want to go there.

  • That's why researchers are working on the Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments, or AREE.

  • It's another NIAC project, currently being developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, or JPL.

  • Venus is such an extreme environment

  • that the longest anything human-made has lasted there is 127 minutes, back in 1982.

  • Building a rover or lander that lasts more than a couple days would be a major achievement,

  • mainly because computers do not like Venus.

  • They overheat super quickly.

  • But what if we could minimize the computerized aspect of the rover?

  • Usually, computers control both the movement and the science,

  • but what if they just controlled the science?

  • That's the concept behind AREE.

  • The rover will have high-temperature computers on board to be its brain,

  • but it'll rely on the environment to move it around.

  • AREE was inspired by an art exhibition that involved enormous wind-propelled machines.

  • It just happens to be that in this case, the wind will be on another planet.

  • The design means that if we do end up launching AREE or a mission like it,

  • we won't have a lot of control over where it goes after it lands.

  • But we've done so little surface exploration on Venus

  • that we're basically guaranteed new, interesting data wherever we explore.

  • Meanwhile, other researchers are working on rovers to explore other worlds below the surface.

  • If we're going to send a rover to Jupiter's moon Europa, which we totally want to do,

  • we're gonna need a robot that can handle a subsurface ocean.

  • Enter the Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration, or BRUIE.

  • The rover would float up against the water-ice boundary on a frozen body of water,

  • and use the ice as a kind of floor to move around.

  • This isn't a NIAC project, it's run by JPL's robotics branch.

  • But the basic goal is the same: to explore a new, out-there idea

  • to see if it could potentially work for future missions.

  • The team has been testing BRUIE in lakes with methane seeps in Alaska.

  • These are lakes that vent methane from their floors because of some underlying geological activity,

  • kind of like the lake version of a deep sea vent.

  • For now, it looks like BRUIE's excursions are all about design testing,

  • but even the test environments could teach us a lot.

  • Methane seeps in arctic lakes have complex communities of extremophiles,

  • microbes that can survive in extreme environments.

  • So as BRUIE explores these lakes,

  • we could learn a lot about some of the most unusual forms of life,

  • the type of life we might find on other worlds, if there's anything else out there.

  • And ultimately, that's the goal with all these futuristic mission concepts.

  • Developing them is a risk,

  • it's expensive, and there's no guarantee the technology will work.

  • And even though Super Ball Bot, AREE, and BRUIE did work, they may never get to space.

  • But it's what we learn in the process that's important.

  • Because someday we will send rovers to explore new worlds,

  • and thanks to projects like these, we'll know exactly how to do it.

  • Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow Space.

  • If you're interested in more of the considerations that go into planning rover missions,

  • you might want to check out our video about why the rovers we send to Mars don't study water.

  • [♪ OUTRO]

[♪ INTRO]

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エクストリームワールドのための3つのユニークなローバー (3 Unique Rovers for Extreme Worlds)

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    林宜悉 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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