Researchers are working on an idea for a robot that can "hop" across Mars instead of using cumbersome wheels.
"Rocket-propelled vehicles capable of travelling a kilometre or more in a ballistic 'hop' with propellants acquired from the Martian atmosphere offer the potential for increased mobility and planetary science return compared with conventional rovers," an abstract Proceedings of the Royal Society press release reported.
The revolutionary design would solve the problem of getting around difficult obstacles, the BBC reported. The hopper could simply jump over the tough area to a flat surface.
The hopper would extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of the red planet and turn it into a liquid. The substance would be exposed to extreme heat, which would shoot the CO2 through a nozzle at high-pressure. The exploding liquid could possible launch the craft up to 300 feet into the air.
"The advantage of this approach is that you have the ability to traverse more aggressive terrains but also that you have wider mobility - the possibility of traversing much greater distances than we have with even the very successful rovers," Hugo Williams of Leicester's Space Research Center said, the BBC reported.
The U.K team first proposed the craft three years ago, and has been working on the idea ever since.
Recently, the team has been tackling the problem of how to build the hopper's legs. Current planetary crafts have legs made from "soft honeycomb material" to soften the impact of landing, the BBC reported. A hopper would need stronger material capable of enduring several landings.
The solution may be a system of moving parts found in many Earthly vehicles.
"It's a magnetic system that many people might recall from science lessons at school," Mike Williams, a mission systems engineer at Astrium, told the BBC.
"When you drop a magnet down a copper tube, you expect it to fall under gravity but it falls very slowly because, as the magnet drops, it creates eddy currents that generate an opposing magnetic field. Our legs would use this approach - a very simple, elegant solution that produces a damping effect," Williams said.
"Nothing is crushed, and there are no fluids, which mean we would be very insensitive to the environment and cold temperatures," he said.
The system still has plenty of kinks that need to be worked out.
As the current model is right now, it would take weeks to produce enough CO2 to launch itself into the air.
"Although we have identified some limitations with various technologies, I think we've demonstrated such a mission is feasible," Williams told the BBC. "Often with these very early and novel concepts, you can show quite quickly that they are totally infeasible. That's certainly not the case here."
