A hop, skip and a jump on the moon — and beyond
Although unmanned, wheeled rovers have explored the surfaces of the moon and Mars for decades, these vehicles have limits — they can’t crawl inside craters, scale cliffs or travel long distances.For more than two years, a team of students led by Professor of the Practice of Astronautics and former NASA astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has been collaborating with engineers from the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory to design and build a prototype for a new type of robotic explorer that would hop over, rather than traverse, a planetary surface. Hopping, they believe, would make it easier for an explorer to access tricky sites and travel greater distances, and thus collect more data during a mission.Known as the Terrestrial Artificial Lunar and Reduced Gravity Simulator, or Talaris, the three-foot-wide vehicle is a prototype of a larger hopper that would be used in space. The team that...