Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have proposed a "tumbleweed" robot that is propelled by wind and can roll across the clouds of Earth, or even Jupiter.
The innovations are being made through a one-year $100,000 study, funded by NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. Through this program, the researchers will investigate the possibility of a "windbot" that could stay buoyant in the atmosphere of a gaseous planet. There is currently no program in place that plans to utilize these types of robots, but the researchers hope their work will lead to a new generation of robotic explorers.
Planets such as Jupiter and Saturn have never been explored by rovers because they do not have solid surfaces, a new breed of robot could help solve this problem and reveal new features of our neighboring planets.
"A dandelion seed is great at staying airborne. It rotates as it falls, creating lift, which allows it to stay afloat for long time, carried by the wind. We'll be exploring this effect on windbot designs," said Adrian Stoica, principal investigator for the windbots study at JPL.
In order to stay airborne, the robots could use wind as a replacement for solar energy as they move through the "nighttime" side of the planet; temperature variations and the planet's magnetic field could also be potential sources of energy. The most promising energy source is believed to be turbulence, which is wind that has dramatic changes in speed and direction. The JPL team is now working to characterize winds among the clouds of Jupiter to provide insight into places that could host these floating robots.
In the future, the researchers plan to build a simple windbot model that would be subjected to subjected to carefully controlled turbulent airflows to determine how to best design these robots for explorations in different environments.
"One could imagine a network of windbots existing for quite a long time on Jupiter or Saturn, sending information about ever-changing weather patterns," he said. "And, of course, what we learn about the atmospheres of other planets enriches our understanding of Earth's own weather and climate," Stoica said.
The robots could also help researchers study weather patterns here on Earth without the need to leave the atmosphere.
"We don't yet know if this idea is truly feasible. We'll do the research to try and find out," Stoica said. "But it pushes us to find other ways of approaching the problem, and that kind of thinking is extremely valuable."
