A deceptive difference having to do with Earth’s and Mars’s gravity may be the reason why NASA’s rovers get stuck in the otherworldly sands.
In the spring of 2019, the six-wheeled Spirit rover was driving backwards to drag an inoperable front right wheel when it got stuck on the sandy Martian surface. Despite spending months trying to excavate its robot, NASA could not free Spirit. Now, engineers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison may have figured out a way to better prepare NASA’s robots for extraterrestrial environments.
In a paper published in the Journal of Field Robotics, the team of engineers used computer simulations to uncover a missing element in the way NASA tests its rovers on Earth. Rather than only accounting for the effect of gravity on the rover prototypes being tested on Earth, the engineers behind the recent study suggest that NASA has overlooked gravity’s pull on the sand itself.
