While NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have captured the world’s attention with their discoveries on Mars, nearly half of Mars missions have unfortunately ended in failure over the years.
Team Tumbleweed offers an innovative approach that dramatically improves the odds of success while exponentially reducing the costs of Mars missions: sending a swarm of low-cost, wind-driven rovers that will roll across the Martian surface like tumbleweeds, plants commonly found in deserts. Team Tumbleweed’s mission is to make deep space accessible for everyone.
The New Space start-up has a lot of groundbreaking ideas for cost savings and sustainability. One of them is doing away with current propulsive landing systems as they are heavy, expensive and risky. Instead, Tumbleweed rovers use a purely passive, drag based landing system, which strikes a happy medium between decelerator mass and impact acceleration to deliver payloads with unprecedented cost-effectiveness. This results in a 2-order of magnitude cost reduction for landing payloads on Mars.
Furthermore, the lightweight, spheroid rovers are designed to harness the power of Mars’ fierce winds to propel themselves autonomously. Equipped with cameras and other scientific instruments, a swarm of these tumbleweed rovers can cover a large area of Mars. 90 rovers can cover over 10% of the Martian surface while ensuring planetary protection protocols are followed. The beauty of this swarm approach is that even if some of the rovers fail, the swarm as a whole can still achieve its objectives.
What’s more, the tumbleweed design allows these rovers to traverse rocky and steep terrain that has challenged wheeled rovers in the past. Tumbleweed rovers can explore inaccessible areas including canyons and craters too risky for traditional rovers. Although the initial target is Mars it is clear that these rolling rovers can be used on any planet with winds or currents including Earth applications, where they may be used to collect data in remote areas or even the ocean depths.
Team Tumbleweed’s swarm of rovers offers a low-risk and cost-effective new vision for planetary exploration. In harsh environments, there is wisdom in numbers. A swarm of Tumbleweed rovers will provide sustainable access to data of any planet, which has winds or currents.
Picture Source: Team Tumbleweed