Marrs
commonly referred to as the red planet
is one of our closest neighbors beyond
the moon it has qualities that make it a
potentially habitable outpost before all
Martian exploration ended in November
1982 a handful of probes had made the
year-long journey Viking ones orbiter
completed nearly 1500 picture-taking
trips around the planet while its Lander
studied samples and returned to views
from the surface as a result Mars is
well mapped but many questions remain so
researchers are designing systems to
explore the varied Martian geography in
anticipation of a return mission on calm
sunny mornings Jim Burke can often be
found flying this lightweight solar
balloon in the courtyard at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena
California mr. Burke views his study as
an important stepping stone to a larger
goal than gathering more precise
information about the red planet
now the Martian atmosphere is carbon
dioxide and if you put a black balloon
that's light enough with a light enough
payload into that atmosphere the sun
shining on the black balloon will warm
it up like the heat inside a parked car
with the windows shut and it gets hot
enough inside to become a hot air
balloon scientists students and
engineers from Jake
California Institute of Technology have
taken the concept a step further by
testing the feasibility his 30 foot
diameter solar balloon that might be
used to study Mars in theory the device
could be blown around by local Martian
winds during the day to collect data and
take pictures at night it would cool
down lose buoyancy and lower itself to
the ground and to survey the planet's
surface the small clear balloon pulls
the larger one off the ground at night
so it won't get damaged
there are many regions of Mars that
could be explored this way according to
Jim Burnie one very interesting
possibility is to flip the balloon in
the atmosphere get it inflated operating
up in the polar regions and let the
circumpolar winds drift it down across
the polar cap over the layered terrain
which is in the canyons that spiral out
from the polar cap then across the
immense dune fields that surround the
floor caps and on downward into
temperate latitudes on Mars to remotely
explore the surface of Mars a number of
devices have been investigated they
include early roving vehicle prototypes
designed to fall or wheel their way
across alien terrain Rovers continue to
be designed today based on some of these
models University of Arizona's lunar and
planetary labs graduate students and
faculty have recently built this
- wheel prototype Mars roll another
vehicle
this robotic six-wheeled version which
is JPL's latest testbed for
understanding the control
vision systems needed for a Mars mission
according to Brian Wilcox
operators research group at JPL sending
commands to a
Mars would be difficult because of the
10 to 40 minute round-trip delay you
can't just sit there and steer in your
armchair from a TV monitor and make the
vehicle do useful things because of this
long speed of light delay so we've
identified several techniques to
maneuver of vehicle on Mars in such a
way that you can go useful distances in
a day in spite of the fact that the
humans are this long speed of light
delay removed from the action
the rugged vehicle has two TV cameras
for eyes
indisputably of climbing complex
occurred taller than it
the proposed making vehicle would have
robotic arms to make measurements and
collect rock and soil samples
using Rovers onboard vision system
scientists can freeze three-dimensional
images from its pair of television
cameras they can then designate the
pathway to follow continually updating
commands from Earth so that the rover is
able to avoid obstacles and hazards as
more sophisticated visual systems are
developed greater artificial
intelligence and help the rover find its
own way if given I res Aleutian imagery
of the Martian surface and the list of
targeted regions
the hope is to someday send a manned
mission to Mars but a more detailed
study of the planet is necessary first
and these pioneering steps can be made
by roving vehicles and balloons again
Brian Wilcox if you imagine an
expedition Lewis and Clark trying to
survey the Louisiana Purchase they
basically made one track across a very
small fraction of the land surface of
the earth took them years to do it and
yet they found incredible things all
along the way we could certainly have a
dozen Rover missions which yielded
equally interesting results the
exploration of Mars sending unmanned
vehicles as pathfinders for the future