NIAC: Fleets of 'Flat Landers' Could Explore Other Planets

Future space missions may send dozens of rug-like robots fluttering down to the surface of alien worlds, taking much of the risk out of planetary exploration. 

Credit: Hamid Hemmati

Future space missions may send dozens of rug-like robots fluttering down to the surface of alien worlds, taking much of the risk out of planetary exploration.

Researchers are developing flat, blanket-size landers that could be delivered en masse to worlds such as Mars or the Jupiter moon Europa.

The approach represents a radical departure from the surface-exploration status quo, which generally launches single-shot, big-ticket landers or rovers that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to design and build.

The two-dimensional lander idea "gives you the capability to stack them up and distribute them over a wide range of areas rather than just be able to land in only one place, and have one shot at landing," Hamid Hemmati, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said last month at the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium at Stanford University.

"We think it will enable NASA to go places that that they don't dare to go right now."

A new type of exploration
Hemmati and his team got a $100,000 grant from NIAC last year to develop the "flat lander" concept.

The current vision calls for dozens of sensor-loaded sheets, each about 3 feet long by 3 feet wide (1 meter by 1 meter), but less than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) thick, to be toted to another planet or moon by a mother ship.

Mason Peck, Cornell University, In-Orbit Assembly of Modular Space Systems with Non-Contacting, Flux-Pinned Interfaces.

Each sheet would touch down at a different location, without the need for complicated and expensive landing systems such as the "sky crane" that dropped NASA's Curiosity rover onto the surface of Mars in August 2012, researchers say.

Nestor Voronka, Tethers Unlimited, Inc., An Architecture of Modular Spacecraft with Integrated Structural Electrodynamic Propulsion (ISEP)

"These landers should be capable of passive landings, avoiding the costly, complex use of rockets, radar and associated structure and control systems," Hemmati and his colleagues write in a description of the project on the NIAC website.

The loss of a few landers on any particular mission would not be a big deal anyway, Hemmati said.

"They don't all have to survive; we have dozens of them," he said. "Even if half of them make it, it's still good. We'll be happy."