Hiro Ono: There are various causes that that is difficult, however I might say the best problem is the uncertainty, the unknowns. We’ve despatched 10 spacecraft to Mars, realizing loads beforehand concerning the areas the place we landed and explored. However the perfect decision we’ve on Enceladus is about 6 meters (20 ft) per pixel and solely round very restricted areas. We don’t know, for instance, what the floor topography is or what the geometry of the vents is. We nonetheless don’t understand how robust the jets are. It’s actually, actually laborious to design an explorer with out realizing what the atmosphere is.
That’s why EELS is so completely different from rovers, in that its snakelike design offers it some ways of transferring round. If one thing sudden occurs, it could change the mode of locomotion and work out the easiest way to work together with the atmosphere.
SAA: There are two issues happening right here. One is the precise bodily design of this object, however there’s additionally the mind behind this know-how. EELS makes use of synthetic intelligence to determine easy methods to transfer round its atmosphere based mostly on the circumstances it encounters. Hiro, you’ve spoken earlier than concerning the concept of “House Exploration 3.0.” Are you able to discuss just a little bit about this framework for understanding area exploration and the way this know-how represents a brand new section ahead?
HO: The best way we discover planetary surfaces has modified over time. Within the ’60s, NASA despatched a bunch of spacecraft to the Moon as a precursor to Apollo. It was mainly trial and error to study what labored. And that was an affordable technique to learn to get to the Moon as a result of the Moon is close by. You may get there in three days. So we might name that “Robotic House Exploration 1.0”: trial and error.
Mars is six to seven months away, and the launch window opens up solely each 26 months. Now you can not do trial and error and want for the perfect, proper? It is advisable make certain that what you’re going to do will work, so we modified the mode.
We obtained extra cautious; we incrementally realized concerning the atmosphere and refined our capabilities, beginning with flybys, orbiters, landers, after which rovers. Then, we knew sufficient to construct Curiosity and Perseverance — tremendous complicated robots — and now we’re designing an much more complicated Mars Pattern Return marketing campaign. That’s “Robotic House Exploration 2.0.” And that’s how we have been so profitable on Mars prior to now few many years.
However we will’t extrapolate that mannequin to the outer Photo voltaic System, just because it takes a lot too lengthy to get to these locations. In order that’s the place “Robotic House Exploration 3.0” is available in. It includes a extra clever, extra adaptive robotic able to diving right into a extremely unknown atmosphere — a robotic that may study by itself [and] adapt by itself to robustly discover the atmosphere.
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