While more conventional rovers - such as the Mars Pathfinder - must somehow navigate around large, meter-size boulders, a tumbleweed rover would simply roll right over them!
Jones with a 1/4-scale prototype of a tumbleweed rover. Such instrumentation could eventually be used to search for possible water hidden beneath Mars' surface. The team, which includes senior engineer Sam Kim and design engineer Jay Wu, is now preparing for desert tests later this month that will incorporate a radar into the ball's center to test the prototype's ability to find underground water.
TUMBLEWEED GIF FACE FULL
In a lab that appears to mix serious R&D with the ambiance of Santa's festive workshop, Jones and his colleagues are surrounded by shiny Mylar balloons of various sizes, pink and yellow beach balls, heavy-duty nylon tumbleweed ball prototypes, tall tanks of compressed gas and worktables full of mechanical and electronic devices. "And therein was planted the seed," said Jones, "that if we make these things big enough, nothing will stop one." Nothing stopped it." Until Connors, on the borrowed ATV, was able to catch up and corral the escapee. "The ball went up steep, steep cliffs of sand. "Tim was flying over the sand dunes trying to catch it," he said. Watching Connors in hot pursuit, the researchers marveled at the speed of the rogue sphere and the ease with which it moved across the desert, unimpeded by boulders. When one of the wheels broke loose during a test, it traveled across the terrain only too well! Left: The spherically-wheeled rover that inadvertently gave birth to the idea for a giant tumbleweed ball. The moderate, 20-mile per hour afternoon winds drove the ball fast and far.
TUMBLEWEED GIF FACE DRIVER
"It went a quarter of a mile in nothing flat," recalled technician Tim Connors, who quickly saddled up with the driver of a passing all-terrain recreational vehicle to chase down the runaway sphere. View a video of the test narrated by Jack Jonesīelow: To a certain extent, a "tumbleweed" rover would be at the mercy of the whimsical wind, but it would have the ability to "throw anchor" by partially deflating. Their experiments in the Mojave Desert confirmed that 6-meter diameter balls should be able to climb over or around one-meter rocks and travel up slopes 25-degrees and higher in the thin, but breezy Martian air. But researchers were encouraged by the results of tests this summer with a 1.5 meter-tall version of the tumbleweed.
Much of the Martian terrain is sloping and littered with boulders, which makes tough going for most vehicles. But he is enthusiastic about the promise this technology might hold for exploration of Mars and other worlds with thin atmospheres such as Pluto, Neptune's moon Triton or Jupiter's moon Io.įor now, though, the focus is on Mars.
"This is preliminary work," Jones cautions. Then, when it's time to move along again, the ball could be reinflated to roll on toward new frontiers. When it's time to stop for a while, perhaps to study an interesting spot or to wait for the wind to change direction, mission controllers would simply command the ball to partially deflate. Sign up for EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS deliveryĪ payload carrying instruments such as cameras or a water-seeking radar could be held in place by tension cords at the tumbleweed's center.
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