With the Vredefort impact structure, researchers can readily hike out to the structures they want to explore and poke them with scientific instruments. Making similar measurements on other worlds is possible, but it is becoming more and more apparent that the scientific poking around is going to be done by robots, not people.

An article in the journal Open Astronomy discussed an experiment involving a rover driving around a hangar in the Netherlands. That sounds pretty boring, but the place from where the rover was being controlled was far away on the International Space Station (ISS), driven by ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano. The experiment, ANALOG-1, was part of the METRON series of experiments.

Almost all of the interplanetary missions to date have been done by robots, with the exception of the Apollo missions. Robots can go places humans can’t go, but there’s no substitute for a human geologist actually hammering some schist on the Moon or Mars instead of the timid drilling of a robot, but that’s not possible, yet.

The next best thing is having a human control a robot on another planet, possibly from orbit around that planet. That will be much safer than going there in person, and it will still allow better science to be done. However, there are some problems with this method — mainly how to provide feedback to the operator, which is basically the objective of ANALOG-1.

Astronaut Parmitano successfully operated a rover from the ISS, driving the rover over a simulated lunar surface. In addition to driving the rover, he moved the arm on the robot up, down, left, and right and was able to “feel” the arm bumping into things as he moved it. Further, he could tell how much things weighed through a feedback mechanism. According to one of the paper’s authors, Kjetil Wormnes: It is possible that this could, one day, even pave the way to establishing and sustaining a human presence on the Moon.

More Information

Controlling robots from space (EurekAlert)

“ANALOG-1 ISS – The first part of an analogue mission to guide ESA’s robotic moon exploration efforts,” Kjetil Wormnes et al., 2022 January 24, Open Astronomy