Hopping To Explore

A team from MIT and Draper Laboratory of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is developing a probe that will hop across a planetary surface. Until now, movable probes have been driven over the alien terrain, but the team argues a hopper could cover more ground more quickly. For example, NASA's extraordinarily successful Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have covered approximately 20 miles combined since landing in 2004, whereas a hopper could possibly cover 25 miles in a day. "Hopper" may conjure the wrong mental image; the team isn't building exotic pogo-sticks. Rather, the probe, using small rockets, would fly more like a helicopter, flying over large areas before landing.

The team will compete in the Google Lunar X-Prize contest, but expects to have a hopper ready by 2014 while the main GLXP ends in 2012, so it's not clear how serious the hopper team is about winning the competition. Perhaps it is betting that the GLXP will not be won by 2012, and the competition will be extended.

Hoppers would not be limited to the Moon, however. They could be useful on many low gravity worlds-- Mars, the moons of the gas giants, and asteroids. Perhaps the ideal exploration strategy would be to use rovers and hoppers together. Hoppers could provide an overview of an area while rovers, possibly over years, could build up a detailed, connected data set.