NASA to Send Swarms of Robot Bees to Explore Mars
NASA is making a drastic change to how it explores Mars by developing robot bees that will roam the red planet and help scientists gather data.
The space agency first announced the project on March 30, which is still in its early stages. The development came about due to the fact that modern rovers are slow, clunky and very costly compared to the small insect bots.
NASA’s robot bees will be built with sensors and they will be able to move faster than current rovers, covering more ground at a fraction of what it usually costs the agency to explore Mars. They are calling the robot insects Marsbees, writing that the are “flapping wing flyers of a bumblebee size with cicada-sized wings.”
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Part of the reason why the agency believes it will be able to do this is the fact that Mars has low gravity, equaling only a third of the Earth’s gravitational pull, making the idea a possibility even though the red planet has a thin atmosphere.
The bees will perform a variety of tasks for NASA, including mapping the Martian terrain and collecting samples of the planet’s thin air with the hopes of finding methane gas, which would indicate life in the planet. The agency’s Curiosity rover has detected low levels of the gas previously, although it is unclear if it was biologically produced.
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