8 Nasa's Robot That Created To Study The Mystery of Space

In February of 2011, the International Space Station was home to six astronauts and one Robonaut. Not to be mistaken for as paghetti-legged member of Daft Punk, NASA's Robonaut2 was actually the first humanoid robot ever sent to space. Clip: And are you sure this guy isn't related to Hal? Narrator: It spent about four years on the space station before it had a hard wire malfunction in 2015, and then another three years lying broken and creepy until NASA retrieved it in 2018.

After a round of repairs,it's set to return to the space station later this year, but it might not be alone, NASA has a full slate of other wonderfully weird robots it wants to send to space in the near future, and luckily none of the rest participated in a beefcake photo shoot no one asked for. This is Dragonfly. The first multi rotor vehicle from NASA that will ever set foot,er, ski, on another planet.
Part robot, part space drone, Dragonfly will make the 759,000-mile eight-year journey to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Rivers, lakes, and seas across its surface are filled with not water, but liquid methane and ethane. Titan is the only place in the solar system besides Earth with standing bodies of liquid. But there are places along the surface that contain evidence of past liquid water and the complex mole culeskey to producing life, that's what Dragonfly is after. During a 2.5 year mission,the rotorcraft will land in the Shangri-La dune fields and make its way to the Selk impact crater where scientists believe the ingredients for therecipe for life once existed. The coolest part? Titanhas the capacity for life as we know it, and life as we don't. The evidence of water shows habitable conditions for life-forms similar to those on Earth, but the liquid methane andethane could also be home to life, just nothingwe've ever seen before. Dragonfly will focus on bothin order to better understand the origin of life in the universe. It's set to launch in 2026but won't arrive until 2034. LEMUR is more like the motherof robots than its own thing, but we're counting it anyway. LEMUR stands for Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot, it's got four limbs andwas originally conceived as a repair robot for the International Space Station. It uses 16 fingers covered inhundreds of tiny fishhooks, plus a sprinkle of artificial intelligence to scale walls and avoid obstacles. The original project ended in 2019, but technology from LEMUR isbeing used in other robots that still have thepotential for space travel. The Ice Worm could be the name of a terrible superhero, but in this case it's alittle squiggly robot. It's derived from a single LEMUR limb and it moves by scrunching and un-scrunching,just like an inchworm. It's part of a family ofprojects in development to explore Saturn's andJupiter's icy moons. The worm drills into theice, end over end in order to climb or stabilize itselfwhile collecting samples. It also inherited its mama'sAI, which helps it navigate by learning from past slipups. Another LEMUR kid is the Robo Simian. Originally designed asa disaster-relief robot, this humanoid bot has thesame four limbs as LEMUR, but its feet are a little different. Instead of grippy feet, therobot, nicknamed King Louie, has wheels made with pianowire that help it roll over uneven ground. That's especially helpfulin icy environments like Saturn's moon Enceladus,which is what it's being developed for now. RoboSimian can walk,crawl, inch, and even slide on its belly like a penguin.All to meet the challenges presented by silty, breakable ground. Some micro-climbers useLEMUR's fishhook technology to cling to rough surfaces;others use gecko-like adhesive to climb smooth walls. All of them are pocket-sizedvehicles strong enough to survive 9-foot drops. The gecko-inspired tech relieson van der Waals forces, which are basically whathappens when you stick a balloon to your head with static electricity, but on a molecular level. NASA hopes to use these littleguys to repair spacecraft or explore hard-to-reachspots on the moon, or Mars, or anywhere really. Arguably the most famousrobot on its way to Mars is the Mars 2020 Rover. It's about the size of a car:10 feet long, 7 feet tall, and 2,314 pounds of pure robot. It's based on Curiosity,the NASA rover that landed on Mars in 2012. Relying on a proven systemcuts down on costs and risks. The new rover will continueto search for past and present habitable conditions and signs of life. But it's bringing to the table a new drill that can bore holes in thesurface and store the soil and rock samples for later use. Potentially a transportfrom Mars back to Earth so they can be studied in labs, but the rover won't be roving all alone. Inside the Mars Roverwill be a little MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-SituResource Utilization Experiment. Its job is to prove itcan make oxygen on Mars for fuel and breathing - likea happy little robot plant. Mars' atmosphere is made upof about 96% carbon dioxide, no good for humans. This car-battery-sized versionof MOXIE will only be able to produce about 10grams of oxygen per hour. Future oxygen generators willneed to be about 100 times larger for manned missions. Introducing the Mars Chopper. The small, solar-poweredhelicopter will, fingers crossed, be the first in history toprove heavier-than-air vehicles can fly on other planets,and that's basically its sole purpose. Just like MOXIE, it willact as a proof of concept for future missions. The challenge is that Mars'atmosphere has 1% the density of Earth's, making it nearly impossible for helicopters to fly at all. So far it's passed anumber of important tests that give scientistshope that they'll be able to defy the laws of physics. But even if it can't fly,the chopper will basically be the parrot to the Mars Rover's pirate. Engineers are developing grippersthat will allow the copter to cling to cliffsides, a lot like a bird perches on a branch, and surprise, it's another LEMUR baby. Its feet use the same fishhook technology as the four-limbed bot. There's one more robot already up in space that needs to "bee" included. It's called Astrobee, and Ithink that's reason enough for why we have to mention them. There are three Astrobees: Honey, Queen, and Bumble, obviously. Bumble and Honey shot up to theSpace Station in April 2019, and Queen followed regally in July. The free-floating cubes were designed to alleviate some ofthe more routine tasks that astronauts complete daily, like taking inventory or moving cargo. But they'll also be competing with Robonaut 2 for the title of Weirdest Robot in theInternational Space Station.