Is it a Bird? A Plane? No it's ExoFly!

October 09, 2008

Imagine we’ve time-traveled a few decades into the future and you are walking across a desolate, rock-strewn wasteland on Mars with a survey team.

Suddenly an oversized dragonfly-looking creature swoops up from a crater rim. It flits overhead furiously flapping its wings against the cream-colored sky. It makes a broad loop around your group then quickly flutters toward the horizon.

This seeming apparition would be a heart-stopper. That is, until you learned that oversized insect was actually a machine made and dispatched to Mars by another space faring nation engaged in a remote geologic survey of the red planet.

The dragonfly-on-steroids is called ExoFly, a nimble flapping aerobot being prototyped at the Technical University Delft, Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Lightweight autonomous machines like ExoFly may be among the next generation of planetary explorers. Biological evolution’s got a 500 million year jump us in terms of trial-and-error experiments with ingenious ways to travel across our planet. It’s OK to copy from Mother Nature.

In the past few years engineers have gotten a better understanding of the complexities of insect flight and have been able to mechanically duplicate them. Having a small flexible machine capable of flying, hovering, landing and taking off like an insect would open up a new exploration niches that it not easily reachable by rovers or airborne vehicles on far flung worlds.

These small flying robots are ideal for Mars, as well as for Titan exploration. Their tiny onboard cameras would give a unique view of geological terrain that is quantitative different from a rover’s view or high-resolution orbital reconnaissance.

The prototype ExoFly weighs less than an ounce, has a wingspan of only a foot, and can fly for 12 minutes on batteries.

A Mars ExoFly would need a longer wingspan and carry a miniaturized high-resolution digital video camera, sensors, navigation system and instruments.

I think this Robo-Dragonfly might work best it linked symbiotically with a large nuclear powered Mars rover mobile laboratory. The top deck of the rover would have lading pads where several ExoFly’s would touchdown, recharge, and take off.

The ExoFly would scout the terrain ahead of the rover. The rover’s own onboard artificial intelligence might direct the ExoFly to scrutinize interesting looking targets. The three-dimensional terrain image assembled, er, on the fly, from ExoFly’s multiple views could be made into real-time topographic maps for the rover to use.

The aerobot's close-up views are ideal for providing new clues to Mars’ present environmental conditions. Photographing geologic details down to a resolution of the thickness of a dime could offer close-up views at the past martian environment: sedimentary structures, volcanic flow features, particle sizes in water-formed fans and deltas. ExoFly might even try to localize the sources of methane the have been detected by orbiting spacecraft. A potential biomarker, the methane may turn out to be produced by Mars microbes under the soil.

An ExoFly swooping across Saturn's giant moon Titan would provide a wide range of views of a very diverse terrain that may not be easily accessible by a rover. The ExoFly would navigate through a much thicker stormy atmosphere and suck up energy from onboard batteries to keep warm in -300 degree Fahrenheit temperatures.

You might imagine ExoFlys departing from a low-flying Titan hot-air balloon mobile science lab. The aerobots would descend, sampling the lower 1,000 feet of atmosphere. They would then swoop across Titan’s complex landscapes for a close-up look. They would rotate back to the balloon mothership for recharging.

ExoFly technology is just the beginning of thinking about small, even microscope robots for getting into all the nooks and crannies on a planet.

This technology would be ideal on a robotic mission to a nearby exoplanet. ExoFlys and other insect engineering-derived contraptions could blend into an alien biosphere that is crawling with unimaginable creatures. These stealthy explorers might get away without being detected and destroyed by biological predators (or aliens with fly swatters).

The robots are so comparatively simple and lightweight that they could be disposable. The artificially intelligent command ship that made the interstellar voyage might simply replace lost ExoFlys with a duplicate aerobots build autonomously.

So the future outer space explorers may not be hulking Darth Vader breathing astronaut figures, but instead meek, inquisitive machines that are tiny, nimble and ubiquitous.

image/video credit: T.E. Zegers

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[Bart]

New video of ExoFly in Mars Test Bed at ESA ESTEC: http://www.ursaminor.nl/ursaminor/files/RTVUtrechtExofly.avi