At some point on their five-year journey, Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have both gotten their feet stuck in the soil, and NASA is taking notes for the design of the next generation of rovers.

In 2005, Opportunity spent five weeks spinning her wheels in a dune later dubbed “Purgatory.” Last week, Spirit sank into a sandpit scientists are calling “Troy,” and could stay there for weeks — or forever.

But rovers of the future may have an easier time of it. NASA scientists are building an army of prototypes with new and ever weirder ways to rove.

CLIFFBOT

One of the toughest tasks for rovers is climbing steep slopes. Some of the most interesting bits of Martian geology, like exposed rocks on cliff faces or gullies in craters that might once have been flowing streams, are off-limits to Spirit and Opportunity. Anxious engineers fear a spill, or worry that once they’re in, they won’t be able to get back out.

The Cliffbot (known more formally as the Sample-Return Rover) gets around this by borrowing tricks from human mountaineers. It’s tethered to two “anchorbots” that belay it from the top of the cliff using modified fishing reels. This configuration lets it climb down 80 degree slopes to take pictures and soil samples at the bottom.

Cliffbot is already getting its feet dirty: it spent the past three summers doing field tests in Svalbard, Norway, where it froze its batteries off and dodged polar bears.

LEMUR

Another rover tackles the climbing problem with sheer dexterity. With a typically charming NASA acronym, the Lemur (Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robots) was designed to help build things in orbit. It can crawl along a segmented mirror and climb the walls in a rock gym. Engineers hope it will be able to place “holds” in rock and soil, like rock climbers do. And at just 18 inches across, it’s downright adorable.

ATHLETE

The behemoth Athlete (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) rover is based on the Lemur, but it’s anything but cuddly. Designed to carry people and equipment across the surface of the moon, it tackles tough terrain with sheer size. The prototype is four meters (about 13 feet) wide, and the actual rover is expected to be nearly twice that. It can roll up to six miles an hour on the lunar hills, while keeping the center of the vehicle perfectly level. That might not sound like much, but it’s more than 100 times as fast as the Mars rovers, which have each traversed about five miles in as many years. And unlike other rovers, it doesn’t just roll around. It can lift up its limbs to step over boulders (not to mention strike menacing scorpion-like poses).

Athlete would probably be used in tandem with a lunar rover like the one featured at Obama’s inauguration.

“It’s like retired people with their big Winnebago and the Jeep behind them,” said Richard Volpe, manager of Mobility and Robotics Systems Section of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “You park your Winnebago [in this case, Athlete] and it stays stationary for a week or two, and you do your little sortees in your Jeep.”

One way engineers imagine getting these colossal insects to the moon is to make them collapsible. They’d fold down into discs, stack up for the flight, and self-deploy on landing like giant robot spiders popping out of a Pringles can. Another is to have them split into two three-legged “Tri-Athletes” that can click back together or dock to other robots on the moon.

Source/Kaynak : http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/science/~3/A6Q7QrmmKqA/