Thursday, April 21, 2022

The polar-cap robot

The zimmer man has been flooding the zone, or at least the near-Earth environment, with content over the past two or three days. Tonight I'd look at ESA's robot. Which they can control from orbit.

As the 'man points out, this particular robot doesn't work for a "planetary" environment, which means an near-airless irradiated low-G environment; not yet, anyway. And for any 'bot of this genre, Venus is wholly unfit. I should add that Mercury's delta-V pushes back such exploration compared with Mars, our own Moon, even Ceres and Callisto. So: add "cold" to the list of expected conditions.

I think one good next-step might be controlling a robot on Antarctica. This shares many features with the cold worlds, particularly the icy worlds. The orbit to control this 'bot is annoying but then, we are used to comm-delays when contacting Perseverance from all the way over at Earth. Also if the future 'bot is roaming the Martian poles, some lessons learned at Antarctica can be reused there.

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