Ambiguous landing
The tiny LEV2 spherical rover looks cool, hope it made it https://global.jaxa.jp/activity/pr/jaxas/no088/03.html
The tiny LEV2 spherical rover looks cool, hope it made it https://global.jaxa.jp/activity/pr/jaxas/no088/03.html
It was the payload I was most sad to have lost on our crash.
Imagine exploring mars with a combination of a dozen or so flea type robots that have solar panels on them and a robot arm for sample retrieval that can fold up into the body. They can trundle around the surface taking video and picking up samples as desired and then return to the stationary lander that they came from when needed.
The stationary lander can have all of the sample analysis machinery, seismograph, weather station, as well as a high bandwidth uplink to satellites in orbit / Earth.
Keep landing more and more of these within the the same area so that the fleas can travel between the stationary landers as they travel further and further, heck you can even form a mesh network between all of the machines on the ground, and offload a lot of heavy computational processing to the stationary landers that could be powered by an RTG.
You can risk individual fleas doing dangerous things that you otherwise wouldn't want to risk one large all in one lander on, as losing a flea only degrades a small fraction of your research and if fleas get stuck somewhere another flea can attempt to rescue it. You could even have the fleas return home to overwinter if they're not designed to withstand the winter.
There's so much versatility that you gain in a model like this with small disposable rover robots paired with massive stationary landers.
I am very much with you on the 'numerous and cheap' approach to space exploration. That said, the minimal viable robot for and environment like the Moon is not an easy spec to meet, since it needs to operate in wild extremes of temperature that are hard to test for. Then again, cubesats built with very cheap hardware have proved surprisingly versatile.
If that little jumping mechanism were some small, cheap, open-sorce thing, I can only imagine it being weaponized...
However check out this cool vid on Worlds Highest Jumping Robots.
Perhaps the worst part of the lunar operating conditions is the dust. Very small particles, very abrasive, static clings to everything. Cubesats don't encounter dust.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/ames/when-the-mo...
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/dust-an-out-of-this-wor...