Podcaster: Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay
Title: Astronomy Cast Ep. 758: Non-Roving Rovers
Organization: Astronomy Cast
Link: http://www.astronomycast.com
Description: Streamed live on May 26, 2025.
Some of our favorite robots are rovers currently roving around the surface of the Moon & Mars. But there’s some pretty tricky terrain out there and engineers are scheming up clever ways to explore other worlds inspired by life that crawls, slithers, hops and flies. As we explore more surfaces and more complex surfaces throughout the solar system, mission teams are designing robot explorers that don’t sit still and also don’t rove. In this episode, we’re going to take a look at the new technologies that are allowing technology to get around.
Bio: Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today and Dr. Pamela Gay is a Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and a Director of CosmoQuest. They team up to do Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos
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Transcript:
AstroCast-20250602 (1)
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.
[Speaker 3]
Hi, welcome to my lecture.
[Fraser Cain]
AstronomyCast, Episode 758, Non-Roving Rovers. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the Publisher of Universe Today.
With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute, and the Director of CosmoQuest.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Hey Pamela, how are you doing? I am doing well. I think tomorrow I get to actually preview our new Citizen Science project on Twitch.
Oh, that’s amazing.
[Fraser Cain]
Cool. So, if people want to watch this, they should go make sure they’re following CosmoQuest.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah, subscribe to our newsletter.
[Fraser Cain]
I guess when this comes out, it will have already happened, but I guess you can go to the CosmoQuest Twitch channel and see what happened and see all your other announcements and stuff all around.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
Can you even say what you guys are premiering, or is that even still a bit of a secret?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So there’s two projects. The one that I know is go for tomorrow is to map out Little Lowell Crater and look at all the melt features to try and understand how melted regolith sloshes around when an area of the moon gets melted during an impact. The other project is trying to understand if improved algorithms successfully mosaic pictures of Mars together.
It’s one of these, you look, you click, you look, you click. That one, I’m still working with the scientists to get approval on, so it may not be ready to be previewed tomorrow. The one weird, I’m having a branding nightmare.
So CosmoQuest has a bunch of DEI content on it. We have a very inclusive Discord, and I don’t want to have to delete any of that. So our new citizen science projects are going to be on a new URL that is part of the psi.edu domain. That’s our parent organization. So I don’t have to delete DEI content from CosmoQuest. Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
Wonderful. Some of our favorite robots are rovers currently roving around the surface of the moon and Mars, but there are some pretty tricky terrain out there and engineers are scheming up clever ways to explore other worlds inspired by life that crawls, slithers, hops, and flies. And we will talk about it in a second, but it’s time for a break.
And we’re back. All right. So where are the rovers right now?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Okay, so the rovers today, there is several functional on Mars and many less than functional on Mars.
[Fraser Cain]
Right.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And there are many that died unfortunate deaths on the moon prior to getting to do their job. There are a bunch that got dropped on asteroids by Japanese missions, and that’s very pleasing. But so far, that’s it.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And that’s just rovers. And there’s been a couple of alternative ideas that have been tried out.
Obviously, we’ve got the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars that went with Perseverance, the first rotor craft that has explored.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Minerva 2 on Hayabusa 2 is my favorite. What were they? So they were torque thrusters, for lack of a better way to explain it.
I mean, they weren’t actually thrusters. These were disks. They looked like really thick record players, essentially.
And they had inside of them a torque device that would basically move slowly, and they’d go ka-thunk. And the counter motion to the ka-thunk would fling the spacecraft. And the reason they had to do this was the gravity on the asteroids.
They were planning to do this on Itokawa initially, but Minerva 1 didn’t work so well. But when they got to Ryugu, Minerva 2 A and B, the gravity is so low they couldn’t rove without accidentally sending themselves into orbit or worse. So this torque mechanism allowed them to fly 50 feet or so, no big deal, on a ballistic trajectory after launching themselves with a solid ka-thunk.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. Right. So they just spun up for a second, gave themselves a kick in the opposite direction, in the low gravity, flung themselves wildly, randomly, and then landed somewhere else and took a look around and then did it again.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And because it was rotatable, they could kind of sort of pick what direction they flung themselves in.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. That’s awesome. I mean, it just shows you like in that low gravity, it’s surprisingly difficult to be able to explore around.
Okay. So, so then I guess that sort of leads into the weird terrain and the fascinating terrain that is out there across the solar system that we would want to explore that is beyond the reach of a six wheel rover.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. So we have basically three different issues to deal with. One is how do you maneuver when the gravity is so low that one wrong move and you’ve left the world?
[Fraser Cain]
Right.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
The second is low gravity worlds can have much steeper faces, much more easily deep holes and taller mountains than we get with our gravity.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. We think about like the Rosetta mission on, on 67P where the Philae lander tried to land.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
And it is a nightmare of deep crevasses and jagged mountains. One of the most compelling pieces of space media that has ever been made, in my opinion, is this short animated sequence, like, like actual pictures taken where you’re seeing this steep cliff on the side of the comet 67P and it’s kind of almost like it’s snowing around there and it just looks so rugged, like the Himalayas almost. And this was images taken by the Rosetta mission as it was an orbit around it.
It just gives you a sense of just how nasty that terrain is. And so you get, as you say, those steep cliffs and when you match that with almost no gravity, it’s really hard to get purchase, to be able to move confidently in such low gravity across such steep terrain. Okay.
So there’s, there’s two horrible nightmares.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And then the last one is we have icy landscapes and we have those on earth too. And we know from earth just how easy it is to lose things into crevasses and other bad icy features. And so as we look to go to Titan, which is lower gravity, different thickness of atmosphere allows it to have methane, ethane acting like water does on earth.
We have to start worrying about completely different icy snowy surfaces. And then someday we’re hopefully going to be going to Europa with more than a flyby mission. Europa Clipper is basically a very fancy flyby mission that’s in orbit around Jupiter.
If we’re landing on that surface, we’re going to have to contend with all of the massive cracks on that world and a desire to not fall through the ice.
[Fraser Cain]
All right. So we’re going to talk about some of the interesting prototype ideas that have been tested out here on earth in a second, but it’s time for another break. And we’re back.
All right. So now that we know the horrible, horrible landscape that awaits us out there in the solar system, what are some really clever ideas that people are working on to be able to try and explore these regions?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
The one that made me giggle the most is called the Lunar Pogo. Have you interviewed anyone about this one? Yes.
[Fraser Cain]
Well, not specifically the Lunar Pogo, maybe. But there was a NIAC grant for an Enceladus Pogo, and I’ve interviewed the engineer behind that. But it could be the same team.
I don’t know if you’ve seen, like they actually have, it’s a one-legged robot that can bounce around on that one leg, and they actually can have this thing and they can drive it around here in the lab with a remote control, and it just goes boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, and they can actually operate it like a rover, yet it can hop from across varying and weird terrain.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And so the idea here is it has this one leg, and the leg touches down, and the important part of your hopper goes down the leg, capturing the energy in the process, and then it uses some mechanism, often expanding gas, to fling itself back up the leg and initiate the hop. And so you’re once again looking at that conservation of momentum process. There’s also the spring energy involved.
There’s a little bit of combustion with the hopping mechanism that’s using expanding gases. And so it allows you to be, in some ways, much more effective with your expanding gases to hop around than just using expanding gases, which is like what IM2’s GRACE mission would have done had it been allowed to operate.
[Fraser Cain]
The thing I like about that mission, and the one that I did the interview, so it has two wheels as well, which are at 90 degrees of each other. And so they act as reaction wheels. And so then the hopper, if it falls over onto the ground, it can roll around on these wheels, and then it can position its hopper leg underneath itself and then hop again.
And then it uses the reaction wheels to maintain its position and even rotation while it’s upward. So you can sort of mix and match. And a lot of the issues that you may be thinking of, like, well, what if it falls over?
Well, it can right itself, prepare for another jump, and then just get back into jumping. And in fact, it might be necessary that if these things are solar powered or some kind of battery, then they’re going to have to hop for a while until the battery runs out, and then they’re going to have to rest, refill their batteries, and then begin the hopping process all over again. And so you can kind of mix and match.
And so you get the reaction wheels that keep it stable, but also allow it to drive around on the surface, depending on the terrain.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And being able to put yourself upright again is kind of the dream.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
I’m so tired of missions falling over. Yes.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Yeah. That should be like now, like, has to be mandatory that you’ve got to put some kind of writing arm on your on your lander.
It would save so many problems if they just had a little arm that could push themselves back upright. I mean, I guess not if they broke their leg, but anyway. Yeah.
So there are a bunch of hoppers and they have been proposed, you know, imagine you have this one on Enceladus that is jumping back and forth through the plumes, taking samples as it just jumps from crag to crag around on Enceladus, something jumping across the surface of Mars, down into deep, deep craters, something on the surface of Mercury that’s getting a lot of electricity from solar panels that are just being filled up. Hoppers that could work on, you know, asteroids, things like that.
You know, how are there any that are like really considering being deployed? I know of one, but if you know any others.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Well, so there was grace that was planned. May it rest in peace in whatever crater it landed in. And, and I space has payloads on it that it just lists as and other payloads.
So the one they’re talking about is they have a rover on board. That’s just like a traditional little wheels to go. So I don’t know of any right now, but this is where, you know, the missions that haven’t launched far better than I do.
So hand it over to you.
[Fraser Cain]
Yes, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So the Chinese are planning one with their, with one of their upcoming lunar landers.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Okay.
[Fraser Cain]
And it’s going to have a hopper on board, but I think you’re right. There’s a, it’s an eye space or it’s an intuitive machines. There’s a bunch of these.
And then the Japanese space agency is planning various versions of this, considering this for their upcoming mission to Phobos sample return mission to Phobos. So there’s a bunch in the works and I think we will see more and more of these as this technology gets, gets developed more. Okay.
So hoppers. Uh, let’s talk about things that can fly, you know, obviously we know about ingenuity, but what else?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So ingenuity was a traditional helicopter with the main rotor, uh, which they tend to be more stable, but they require one large fiddly engine and don’t have redundancy with the dragon fly mission. They want redundancy. And so they have their own rotor craft.
It’s 450 kilograms and it has, uh, it’s not a quad copter. It’s an optic copter and this mission can handle if one of its engines decides, I won’t, I won’t do the work today. I, so they had, they have the ability to fly on diminished numbers of rotors the same way we see we have Mars rovers that can rove with a diminished numbers of wheels.
And this allows missions to keep going even when stuff breaks and stuff does break.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Especially in those kinds of conditions. Like what a, it’s cold.
There’s hydrocarbons everywhere that’s going to turn into like soot that’ll get into some of its mechanisms.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
That could be a bad day.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. Yeah. So, so as we start trying to understand what are the ways to go, it really depends on what size you’re looking at and how much redundancy you’re worried about.
Um, the control systems for quad copters require a lot more computational ability. I, the engines can be much smaller, much lighter. I, the counterbalances helicopters are much more stable, require less computational power, but have no redundancies.
And uh, then you just keep adding writers after that.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. So that’s all that’s firm that we know of. And so now I’m going to move into the stuff that are proposed and planned.
Um, you know, the, the obvious solution. Like now that with the success of ingenuity, the obvious answer is let’s put a helicopter on everything. Like they’re so light, can produce such amazing science.
They serve as the scout that you can bring. So uh, the Chinese are considering a helicopter with their sample return mission, something that could go a little further afield from the landing spot to try and grab some interesting samples.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
You can only do this on worlds with atmospheres, just to be clear.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Um, and then there’s an, an really interesting proposal for a helicopter was it was presented at the recent lunar and planetary science conference. I forget the name of it, but it would be like a beefier version of ingenuity.
So it would still be a twin rotor, like, like, you know, a helicopter with like two rotors on top of each other, if it’s spinning in opposite directions to keep balanced, but it would have, um, or maybe no, actually they had proposed an, uh, hexacopter. That’s right. So it would have six rotors and it would be like a drone with six rotors.
And then it would have the ability to carry a fairly large payload, like a couple of kilograms would be able to fly for longer periods of time before it had to come down and recharge. And there’s some, you know, some really interesting regions that we want to explore like Valles Marineris. So you can imagine a helicopter taking off from the rim of Valles Marineris and dropping into the largest, um, chasm, you know, longest, largest chasm in the solar system and exploring that.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
That would be amazing.
[Fraser Cain]
Yes, please. Yeah. Um, and there’s also some really interesting jumbled terrain that it would be a nightmare for, uh, any kind of rover.
And yet it tells us some really interesting information about the, you know, the formation of Mars, its current volcanic activity, things like that. So, um, uh, yeah, those are, those are some ideas. So I think we’re going to see plenty more helicopters going to Mars in the, in the future.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And what I’m intrigued by is Boston Dynamics does insane legged robots. And to be clear, bipedal robots are not the most effective things out there, but there are many legged, often learning from insects, how to move, uh, tiny things are capable of scaling all sorts of wild, crazy terrains. And so we’ve gotten so frustrated now and then with things like Percy struggled through a boulder field, trying to find the right place to cross a dry river bed.
And, uh, curiosity has stared at various skate landscapes multiple times and been like, I shall not climb that.
[Fraser Cain]
Nope. Yeah. That looks too steep and too sandy and I could get stuck.
No thank you.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
But these little spidery things that look straight out of Stargate. If you remember the, the, uh, the, the, the replica, the replicants, yeah, if you remember the replicants, Boston Dynamics has built some very similar looking things and, and take those and start building yourself a wifi network and exploding out from your base. And that’s kind of an awesome way to climb down into a crater and climb right back out.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. All right. We’re going to get weird in a second and talk about some really strange ideas for rovers.
But first it’s time for another break and we’re back. All right. So you started to introduce the idea of spider-like robots and again, you know, people are, are developing versions of this, you know, insect like walking structures.
That’s great. What other really innovative ideas have you seen?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So it’s, it requires going with a friend, which in general is a good idea. Back in the Google Lunar XPRIZE days, there were teams that were looking at, you have your main rover, and then you have a little dude with two wheels and a lot of rope. And you essentially go attached to the big rover, zooming out, and then you lower yourself essentially on your own built in winch into whatever hole it is you’re coming up on.
And there are caved in lava tunnels on both the moon and Mars. And on both worlds, you don’t have a sufficient magnetic field or sufficient atmosphere to protect you from radiation from space. And getting into these tunnels is probably one of the safest places we can eventually put ourselves.
And getting to go and explore these with these winch enabled little two wheeled devices is just kind of awesome.
[Fraser Cain]
People have described it like mountain climbers who are like roping off of each other. And so you could have a, you know, the, as you say, the main, the main part that is able to clamp in and hold tight, and then it can deploy a smaller rover out on a cable, maybe let it go at the end of the cable or reel it back in and then go look somewhere else. Yeah, that’s a great idea.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And this is where I have to admit, because you read all of the stuff that hasn’t happened yet. I just want to sit back and listen to who you’ve interviewed about what weird stuff is coming in the future.
[Fraser Cain]
Oh my God, I’ve got, there’s so many. Okay.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So what’s your favorite?
[Fraser Cain]
Well, oh man. So my favorite is the idea of a submarine on Titan. So, you know, we know that Titan has these oceans at the, near the Northern pole of liquid methane.
And it’s actually surprising, methane, liquid methane, ethane are very clear optically. And so you could deploy a submarine that could go down to the bottom of one of these lakes and could then send messages back through the material to some orbiting spacecraft and, and, you know, explain what it’s seeing. People have proposed a sailboat on Titan, that there is actually enough wind on Titan that you could deploy a sailboat into one of these and it could then tack around and explore and then maybe even deploy a submarine as well.
People have proposed snake bots. So you know, these are being used here on earth for like exploring disaster, yeah, exactly. Exploring disaster zones.
And so you could deploy one of these things into, it could crawl into some kind of jumbled up terrain, crawl down into a lava tube, be able to explore around. There’s been a whole host of really interesting balloon ideas. On Mars, it doesn’t work that well, but what you would do is you would have a balloon that would, that you would put some kind of gas and then during the day, the heat would fill up the balloon.
It would, it would rise up off the surface, fly around, and then when night fell, it would sink down to the surface, rest on the side of Mars, and then it would take off again and continue going around. And so you could explore, you know, large chunks of Mars just by using this, this technique. But balloons work really well on Venus.
And so people have proposed that you would be able to have a balloon that could last in the, in the high atmosphere of Venus for long periods of time. And one idea is you use solar power to suck in the carbon dioxide atmosphere of it, and then you turn that into your lifting gas. So you can extract out the different things that you require to be able to create this lifting gas.
And so you would constantly be able to keep replenishing your, your gas from the atmosphere of Venus. And then you could explore and then you could deploy that, you know, you could deploy a long cable with a rover on the end of it that you could try, or a probe on the end of it that you could go down to lower altitudes.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And Titan. You can also do this on Titan, to be clear.
[Fraser Cain]
Yes. Yeah. Balloons were great on Titan, although, you know, it’s cold.
So that’s always really tricky. But if you’re, you know, if you have helium, you know, for as long as you can keep the helium in the system, or if you can break up the methane and get at the hydrogen, there’s, there’s ways that you can do that.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And methane is, is quite easy to use to heat things if you want to provide your own heat to the gas.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. But if you can bring your oxygen, like that’s always the challenge is you need to supply the oxygen. Um, so one of the, I would say one of the weirdest ideas, and this is something that, that NASA is actually testing out, is a rover that crawls on the underside of ice.
And so you have like these, these sea ice apps around Antarctica and they’ve built a rover that floats where it will float up against the underside of the ice and then it can drive around underneath the ice as if it’s driving around on the surface of some smooth material. And it, you know, they’re using it to explore looking for signs of extreme of falls and things like that. But you can imagine this is the kind of thing that might end up in, uh, say if there’s a probe, it’s going to try to melt through the ice on Enceladus or Europa, and then you deploy these guys and then they would just crawl around on the, on the, you know, the shell, the ice shell looking for, for interesting stuff.
Um, NASA is also testing out little, uh, swimming bots, things that can actually sort of kick with flippers and, and, you know, go underwater and go for long periods of time. And so again, something that you could maybe have a melt probe that goes down through the ice on Enceladus or, or Europa, and then deploy these guys and then they’d swim around, uh, looking for, you know, Europa and space whales, obviously. Um, and then like even crazier ideas, like people have been testing out, um, earthworm like stuff that can, um, you know, use the same kind of locomotion where they sort of inflate different parts of their section and be able to, to move and turn and move through various, uh, tight spaces.
So, you know, every single idea that has been proposed, every, you know, the, all the different ways that, uh, people have figured out how to move here on earth, you know, life has found a way, people are considering ways that they can adapt that to work on, on other worlds. And so I think, you know, we are going to see some future where some Mars explorers going to, you know, put their hand out and a little helicopter will take off to give them a good sense of the terrain. You can imagine them walking up to some, some jumbled rocks and deploying a little sneak bot that’ll, they’ll go inside and look around, uh, that there’ll be, as you say, rappelling down the side of a cliff to, to look, get down to the bottom or inside a lava tube.
It’s amazing the kinds of ideas that are, that are possible. Manta ray type flying, uh, vehicles on Venus that would rise and fall depending on, on sort of the, how much energy they have and how much lifting gas they have. You can imagine the, you know, dipping down deep to, to, to explore the, the lower altitude.
And then as it gets too hot, they, they rise back up again and cool themselves off and replenish all of their supplies. So yeah, there’s, there’s been some amazing ideas that people are working on.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
It’s, it’s going to be a wild future getting to watch all of this stuff coming into existence and, and I can’t wait to see it.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And I like ingenuity just to demonstrate it without a doubt, without question that everything needs a helicopter on Mars. You’ve got to bring helicopters.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And, and dragonfly, it can’t get there fast enough. The future flies in so many different ways.
[Fraser Cain]
Totally does. Awesome. Thanks, Pamela.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Thank you, Fraser. And thank you to everyone out there who’s part of our Patreon. Uh, this week I have a new slate of names to thank this week.
I would like to thank Alex Cohen, Andrew Stevenson, Bob Crail, Boogie Nett, uh, Brian Cagle, Brian Cook, Buzz Parsec, Cooper, Daniel Loosley, David Gates, uh, David Rosetta, Disastrina, Felix Gute, uh, Gerhard Schweitzer, Helga Bjorkog, J. Alex Anderson, James Roger, Jeff Hoinmorder, uh, Jimmy Drake, John Drake, John Faiz, Jonathan Poe, Katie Byrne, Katie Annulisa, Keith Murray, Kimberly Rake, Christiane Magerholt, uh, Laura Kettleson, Les Howard, Mark Schneider, Masa Herleyu, Matt Rucker, Mike Dogg, Noah Albertson, Paul, Paula Spazito, Philip Walker, Planitar Rando, RJ Basque, Ron Thorson, Sachi Takaba, Slug, Taz Tully, The Air Major, The Big Squish Squash, The Land, Lonely Sandperson, Thomas Gazetta, and Time Lord Iroh. Thank you all so very much.
[Fraser Cain]
Thanks, everyone, and we will see you next week.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Bye.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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