NASA's next Mars rover to launch in 2020

The stunning success of the Curiosity Mars rover has emboldened NASA to have another go. The US space agency announced plans yesterday to send a new robotic explorer to the Red Planet in 2020.

This rover will have the same chassis as Curiosity and a duplicate sky crane will lower it to the surface. The 2020 rover will even use spare parts left over from the Curiosity mission, such as a nuclear power supply.

Reusing plans and parts is a smart move since NASA can be confident it doesn't have to iron out design kinks, and it will save on costs, says John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the science mission directorate at NASA.

The rover is expected to cost $1.5 billion ? $1 billion less than Curiosity's price tag.

Rock collector

News of the new rover came hard on the heels of a somewhat mixed announcement from the Curiosity mission, revealed on 3 December at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. An interview on public radio with chief scientist John Grotzinger led to frantic speculation that the rover had already found definitive evidence for organics, carbon-containing compounds that are the building blocks of life.

Mission scientists revealed that the rover had baked Mars soil and detected organic molecules inside its ovens, but they couldn't confirm whether the carbon was Martian or merely an Earthly contaminant.

"The Earth-shaking news from Curiosity is that it all works," Grunsfeld said at an AGU press conference on 4 December. "It's amazing that we were able to send such a craft to Mars and the seven minutes of terror [descending through the Martian atmosphere] resulted in a soft landing."

Eventually, NASA is aiming to bring back pristine samples of Martian rock for thorough analysis on Earth. With that in mind, the 2020 rover may test the technologies for sample return, including handling and storing rock on board.

"Including caching would make the rover responsive to the National Academy Decadal Survey," says Scott Hubbard of Stanford University in California, referring to priorities outlined by the US National Academy of Sciences for the next decade of planetary exploration.

The new rover might also have a 3D camera with a zoom lens that was meant to fly on Curiosity. The camera, built in collaboration with film-maker James Cameron, did not make it on board for the 6 August launch because of technical difficulties.

"I was a big fan of the 3D [camera] and the zoom lens," Grunsfeld said yesterday at a press briefing. "I'm more than happy to engage in a spirited discussion for this next rover to include those elements."

Head start

In a slight reversal of plans, NASA also announced at the AGU that it will use some of its 2013 budget to support the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission, due for launch in 2016. NASA will provide the communications system that will let the orbiter talk to Earth and to instruments on the surface of Mars. The agency will also help build the Mars organic molecule analyser (MOMA), the largest instrument scheduled to fly on ESA's ExoMars rover in 2018, Grunsfeld said.

He emphasised that NASA is not asking for more money for the 2020 rover mission, but is merely specifying how the money already requested will be spent.

"We have the backing and the approval of the administration to move forward with this plan," NASA's director of planetary science, James Green, told New Scientist. Other NASA projects waiting for approval need not fear being short-changed, said Grunsfeld. "It doesn't raid other parts of planetary or science [missions]."

For now, NASA's 2013 budget is being debated by Congress. But in making yesterday's announcement, NASA hopes to get a head-start on the new rover mission.

"Even though 2020 may seem like a long way off, it's really not a lot of time to get ready, so we kind of had to start," Grunsfeld told New Scientist. "Being able to put together a science definition team and having things roll six months sooner than later could actually make a difference in the ability to mount such a mission."

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Have your say

Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Please log in.

Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article

Subscribe now to comment.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/264cc55d/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Carticle0Cdn225910Enasas0Enext0Emars0Erover0Eto0Elaunch0Ein0E20A20A0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

droid 4 tom brady sister dad shoots daughters laptop brandon jennings the vow review luol deng culkin

Robotic equivalent of a Swiss army knife: Reconfigurable robot a step toward something that can become almost anything

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2012) ? The device doesn't look like much: a caterpillar-sized assembly of metal rings and strips resembling something you might find buried in a home-workshop drawer. But the technology behind it, and the long-range possibilities it represents, are quite remarkable.

The little device is called a milli-motein -- a name melding its millimeter-sized components and a motorized design inspired by proteins, which naturally fold themselves into incredibly complex shapes. This minuscule robot may be a harbinger of future devices that could fold themselves up into almost any shape imaginable.

The device was conceived by Neil Gershenfeld, head of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, visiting scientist Ara Knaian and graduate student Kenneth Cheung, and is described in a paper presented recently at the 2012 Intelligent Robots and Systems conference. Its key feature, Gershenfeld says: "It's effectively a one-dimensional robot that can be made in a continuous strip, without conventionally moving parts, and then folded into arbitrary shapes."

To build the world's smallest chain robot, the team had to invent an entirely new kind of motor: not only small and strong, but also able to hold its position firmly even with power switched off. The researchers met these needs with a new system called an electropermanent motor.

The motor is similar in principle to the giant electromagnets used in scrapyards to lift cars, in which a powerful permanent magnet (one that, like an ordinary bar magnet, requires no power) is paired with a weaker magnet (one whose magnetic field direction can be flipped by an electric current in a coil). The two magnets are designed so that their fields either add or cancel, depending on which way the switchable field points. Thus, the force of the powerful magnet can be turned off at will -- such as to release a suspended car -- without having to power an enormous electromagnet the whole time.

In this new miniature version, a series of permanent magnets paired with electromagnets are arranged in a circle; they drive a steel ring that's situated around them. The key innovation, Knaian explains, is that "they do not take power in either the on or the off state, but only use power in the changing state," using minimal energy overall.

The milli-motein concept follows up on a paper, published last year, which examined the theoretical possibility of assembling any desired 3-D shape simply by folding a long string of identical subunits. That paper, co-authored by Cheung, MIT professor Erik Demaine, alumnus Saul Griffith, and former Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research scientist Jonathan Bachrach, proved mathematically that it was possible for any 3-D shape to be reproduced by folding a sufficiently long string -- and that it's possible to figure out how to fold such a string, and the exact steps needed to successfully reach the desired endpoint.

"We showed that you could make such a universal system that's very simple," Cheung says. While he and his colleagues have not yet proved a way of always finding the optimal path to a given folded shape, they did find several useful strategies for arriving at practical folding sequences.

Demaine points out that the folding of the shape doesn't have to be sequential, moving along the string one joint at a time. "Ideally, you'd like to do it all at once," he says, with each of the joints folding themselves to the desired configuration simultaneously so that the loads are distributed.

Other researchers, including some at MIT, have explored the idea of fashioning reconfigurable robots from a batch of separate pieces that could self-assemble into different configurations -- an approach sometimes called "programmable pebbles." But Gershenfeld's team found that a string of subunits capable of folding itself into any shape could be simpler in terms of control, power and communications than using separate pieces that must find each other and assemble in the right order. "You can just pass signals down the chain," Knaian says.

It's part of an overall approach, Gershenfeld explains, to "turning data into things." In an article in the current issue of the magazine Foreign Affairs, he describes a technology roadmap for accomplishing that, and its policy implications. He and his colleagues have established a global network of more than 100 "fab labs" that provide community access to computer-controlled fabrication tools. Today, the design information is contained in an external computer rather than in the materials being manufactured, but the research goal is to digitize the materials themselves so that they can ultimately change their own shape, as the milli-motein does.

Hod Lipson, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and computing and information science at Cornell University, says, "This result brings us closer to the idea of programmable matter -- where computer programs and materials merge to form a new kind of matter whose shape and function can be programmed -- not unlike biology. Many people are excited today to learn about 3-D printing and its ability to fabricate any shape; Gershenfeld's group is already thinking about the next episode, where we don't just control the shape of objects, but also their behavior."

The milli-motein is part of a family of such devices being explored at size scales ranging from protein-based "nanoassemblers" to a version where the chain is as big as a person, Gershenfeld says. Ultimately, a reconfigurable robot should be "small, cheap, durable and strong," Knaian says, adding that right now, "it's not possible to get all of those." Still, he points out, "Biology is the existence proof that it is possible."

The MIT researchers' work could lead to robotic systems that can be dynamically reconfigured to do many different jobs rather than repeating a fixed function, and that can be produced much more cheaply than conventional robotics.

The development of the milli-motein was supported by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation and Programmable Matter projects.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original article was written by David L. Chandler.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/IU_HhUYDock/121130132743.htm

rock and roll hall of fame 2012 brandon rios oklahoma news nascar news doppler radar colorado rockies moonshine