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The Airbus team is training a prototype rover to recognise and pick up small cylinders off the ground. It's a rehearsal for a key part of a multi-billion-dollar project now being put together by the US and European space agencies - Nasa and Esa.
Returning rock and dust materials to Earth laboratories will be the best way to confirm if life exists on Mars. It is, though, going to take more than a decade to achieve.
The small tubes - about the size of whiteboard markers - being manipulated by the Airbus prototype represent the Martian samples.
The idea is that these will have been selected, packaged and cached on the surface of the Red Planet at various locations by the Americans' next big rover, which launches in seven months' time. It would then be the job of a later European robot, launching in 2026, to run around and pick up the cylinders. This "fetch rover" would deliver the tubes to a handling station, from where they could be despatched to Earth. They would arrive home in 2031.
(Score: 1) by istartedi on Friday December 06 2019, @09:28PM
Mars gravity is approx 38% of Earth's. We're talking about some small samples here, without any of the stuff required to support humans. Lunar gravity is approx 17%, which helps a lot but we got samples *and* two humans blasted off the Moon safely. Mars has an atmosphere, but it's really thin so the aerodynamic stress on the rocket is nowhere near as bad as blasting off from Earth.
Mostly this boils down to it being small and un-crewed. They'll do everything they can to make the rocket smart enough to blast off without any help from Mission Control. If it fails, they lose a lot of time and money; but no lives.
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