Meet "Hedgehog": Engineers build cube-like rover for exploration of asteroids, comets
Monday, February 8, 2016 - 06:41
in Astronomy & Space
Your best guess is that the landscape is as inhospitable as it gets: An irregular range of sharp boulders and loose rubble piles strewn among jagged crevasses and deep troughs of dust. But then again, it's just a guess because no one's ever actually seen this landscape up close. Now imagine that you need to send a robot across that landscape, from a perch at the lip of a steep crater to the edge of an ice-encrusted hole 1,000 meters away. And imagine that gravity is a tiny fraction of what we have on Earth. And you can't communicate with the robot because it's 50 million miles away and circling to the far side of Mars. What would that robot need to look like?