NASA Developing Robotic Bees to Collect Samples, Map Mars Surface
NASA’s Mars rovers have gathered a lot of exciting data and photographs, but they’re moving at a snail’s pace. So how will it expedite that process? Robotic bees.
The space agency is developing bee-sized robots to map the surface of Mars and collect samples from the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists hope these insectoids will be more mobile and agile than traditional rovers.
The program, called “Marsbees,” is contracting researchers from the U.S. and Japan to build prototypes of winged robots, capable of swarming the red planet and collecting data, before returning to a rover to recharge.
Image courtesy uah.edu
One of the biggest obstacles engineers face is designing a robot that can fly in Mars’ unique climate. The red planet’s atmosphere can be pretty hostile with dust storms, low thermal inertia, and periodic ice ages. These bees will inevitably face some extreme weather conditions.
But there is one factor that may make the mission easier – Mars’ gravitational pull is about a third of Earth’s, which could prove to be more conducive to flight.
NASA’s website envisions the robots as roughly the size of a bee, but with larger, cicada-sized wings. Researchers imagine the bees will be capable of working independently or in teams to collect samples.
The program funding the project is called the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, or NIAC, which fosters science fiction concepts with the potential for realistic applications.
The aerial bots would primarily search for methane emissions from below the planet’s surface – an indication of subterranean Martian life. NASA’s Curiosity rover previously discovered low levels of the gas, encouraging scientists to explore further.
But the technology for this apian concept doesn’t have a lot of promising precedent. Several years ago, DARPA built a hummingbird-inspired drone, with a multi-million-dollar budget. Researchers engineered it to fly steadily, but the winged machine would likely struggle in the Martian environment.
Engineers working on the Marsbees prototype will test their robots in a vacuum chamber, with conditions to simulate the climate and air density on Mars. The group is receiving just $125,000 over the course of nine months to fund their prototype, before it will be tested for feasibility by NASA. If it passes preliminary tests, it will then be eligible for a second round of funding.
About the Author
Andrew Basiago Involved in Project Pegasus Time Travel Program
We live in a strange time, where uncertainty about the future is at an all-time high – political systems are in disarray, technology will either prove to be our savior or undoing, and weather patterns are chaotic. There is however, one man who claims to have visited the past and future, during which he delivered dire messages to deceased presidents and gained intel from our future government. Having been involved in a CIA time travel program called Project Pegasus, Andrew Basiago has prescient knowledge to save humanity as we know it, and he is running for president of the United States.
DARPA Project Pegasus
According to Basiago, between 1962-’72 the U.S. government ran a clandestine operation called Project Pegasus. The program led to the successful development of a number of highly advanced technologies allowing for teleportation, physical time travel, and holographic time travel. He claims the program was run jointly by the CIA and DARPA, and was used to contact former presidents, teleport to Mars, and maintain a rapport with extraterrestrials.
Beginning when he was just a child, Basiago was selected from a group of psychically gifted children to become a time traveling liaison who would go on to meet historical and future dignitaries, as well as various extraterrestrial entities.
Basiago says his father had previously worked for the Ralph M. Parsons Engineering Corporation, where he helped develop the technology.
When Basiago was brought to participate in his first “jump,” he says his father had already been time traveling for years at the Curtiss-Wright corporation in New Jersey. It was here where he was first exposed to the portal he would later use to teleport through time and space.
The portal itself, Basiago describes as two parentheses-shaped booms that were 8 feet tall and spaced about 10 feet apart. He describes the computer configuration from which the portal was being controlled as rudimentary and plugged into the wall with a power cord that would look more fitting if it lead to a lathe or drill press – ironic for a machine capable of tearing the space-time continuum.
Andrew Basiago Gettysburg Jump
Upon activation, this time-traversing machine created a “vortal tunnel” from radiant energy that was capable of bending the fabric of reality. This radiant energy was discovered by Nikola Tesla, whose schematic was posthumously discovered by the government in his New York apartment in 1943. The technology was parlayed into what Basiago calls a plasma confinement chamber which a user jumps into before being transported to a different moment or place in time.
His first journey teleported him to the state capital of New Mexico, though he remained in the same time period. Later in his life he says he was able to corroborate the capital building as a common location involved in the program from a woman who said she saw people materialize there. He continued this training by traveling just a few hours back in time to get used to the sensation.
Eventually, he would travel back to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, Washington’s tent during the Revolutionary War, and even to the time of Jesus. He says the government had a desire to check the veracity of the historical accounts of these three figures, due to their significance and the fact that they have been written about extensively.
Basiago says he also traveled to the future, to the year 2045, where he was transported to a building made of emerald and tungsten steel. There he was given a miniature canister of microfilm to be brought back to the ‘70s, which contained a wealth of knowledge of every historical event up until then. Apparently, not everything is digitized in the future.
