A British-made robot will attempt to beat NASA in discovering life on Mars.
Designed and built in Stevenage in England by Airbus Defence and Space, the Mars rover is going through final testing for a special experiment in April. The robot named Bruno is one of three prototypes, with the others called Bridget and Bryan, created for planetary navigation.
In about two years, a six-wheel machine retaining a “brain” similar to Bruno’s will be sent to the red planet to look for signs of life through soil samples and take color images of the landscape.
“It’s not possible to drive this sort of machine with a joystick. You’ll crash it,” says Airbus Defence and Space head of science Ralph Cordey, warning that Mars is so far that radio signals could take 40 minutes to go back and forth. “So this rover is designed to be semi-autonomous.”
The robot is expected to have the unique capacity to build its own 3D map of its surroundings, outline its own path and steer itself.
After its launch on March 14, the ExoMars orbiter will hurtle toward the red planet at 20,500 miles per hour. Thus, scientists are now preparing to work on the rover that will venture into space.
This state-of-the-art device, however, also has a limitation: it can get confused by shadows formed by caves and craters.
“To explore those areas, it’s more efficient to have a human in the loop,” says Jeremy Close, communications director of Airbus Defence and Space.
British astronaut Major Tim Peake’s help has been enlisted to remotely steer the robot from space. Major Peake, who is part of the crew orbiting Earth from the International Space Station, will drive the rover into a “cave,” simulated through plunging half the sandpit of Mars to darkness.
Peake will steer the robot through a barrier raised across the testing field that measures 98 feet by 42 feet, where he will look for targets that will be marked with “X.” The testing site lies in a giant hangar that contains 250 tons of sand with artificial boulders along with a panoramic backdrop of the planet.
These mean that while human controllers provide coordinates, Bruno will figure out the best way to get somewhere – unlike previous rovers that have to sit idle for a long period of time while waiting for instructions beamed up from operators on Earth.
The ExoMars probe is the first of two joint missions between the European Space Agency and the Roscosmos of Russia, and it will take on a seven-month journey to explore Mars’ atmosphere.
This year’s mission involves a Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) that will seek out traces of methane and other compounds that could possibly be shed by biological sources. Methane is a by-product of biological or geological action, breaking down within short periods of time once reaching the atmosphere.
Jo Johnson, universities and science minister of the UK, lauded the UK-developed technologies enabling the country’s own Mars mission.
“We want the UK to be at the forefront of major discoveries like this,” Johnson says.
