GREENBELT, Maryland -- If the visionaries of today have their way tomorrow, NASA planners in the future could unleash an odd-looking menagerie of robots to explore planets and space in ways that humans never will.

Researchers envision things like 3-foot- (1-meter-) long dragonfly-like robots to buzz high above Mars, mechanical eels and seahorses to swim deep beneath the ice on Jupiter's moon Europa or "self-transforming" plastic explorers that can morph themselves into different shapes -- like the fearsome T-1000 in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

"We haven't found anything that says this is a stupid idea."
     

The first flying machines on Mars, for example, may well be patterned not on aircraft, helicopters or even birds but on the lowly insect. Only insects, some researchers believe, have wing motions capable of creating enough lift in Mars' low-density atmosphere to take off, hover and land.

"We haven't found anything that says this is a stupid idea," said Anthony Colozza, an aerospace engineer at the Ohio Aerospace Institute in Cleveland. "It seems oddball, but it's the only lift mechanism we know of that can take advantage of Mars' atmosphere to actually fly."

The Ohio institute is looking into the martian dragonfly idea with help from researchers from Georgia Tech, who have been studying robotic insect "warriors" for use by the Pentagon.

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While robot insects might be buzzing overhead on the Red Planet, other types of robots that can change from one shape to another might be climbing martian cliffs or crossing ravines.

These "self-transforming" robots, made entirely out of plastic, could on command from Earth controllers, use their plastic joints and muscles to pull themselves apart and rebuild into something else.

"We could send a bag of plastic to Mars and send a signal from Earth and have it self-transform into the shape we want during the mission," said Steven Dubowsky, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It's possible, he said, because of advances in electrically conducting polymers or plastics that are embedded with tiny actuators. Those actuators trigger movement of robotic "muscles" and "joints" with 1,000 times the strength of the strongest human on Earth.

"Self-transformers" could go where rovers couldn't, such as up a cliff or across a ravine. They could do this, Dubowsky said, by building themselves in Tinkertoy-fashion into a ladder or bridge. That would allow companion robots to climb a mountain or traverse a canyon.

At mission end, "it'll dispose of itself in an ecologically friendly way," he said.

Meanwhile, Jupiter's moon Europa could have robots resembling eels and seahorses swimming under the icy surface in search of life.

"You're going to need a team of these 'robo-swimmers,'" said Thomas Vaneck of Physical Sciences Incorporated, which is looking into the idea. "You're probably not going to have life everywhere [on Europa]. But you may have pockets of life…and a single vehicle is not going to be able to do much."

Modeling the robots on Earth's marine life makes sense, he said, because "nature's had a long time and an infinite budget" to develop the most efficient explorers. Seahorses, for example, can swim against ocean currents and use their tails to grab on to something and remain stationary.

None of the proposals stand a chance of getting off the launch pad unless NASA agrees to buy into them.

"We're hoping for as many as we can," said Robert Cassanova, director of NIAC. "But it's not going to happen [that all will be accepted]."

Meetings like this week's provide the opportunity "to get the discussion going. We have always tried to be open and encourage scientific debate. These are very diverse concepts."

The researchers themselves are resigned to the fact that even if their proposals are accepted it will be decades before any results come back.

Typical is the view of Ralph McNutt, of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, which is studying the idea of a deep-space probe to launch between 2012 and 2015 for a target star, Upsilon Eridani, that is 10.7 light-years away. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year -- about 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).

The project, McNutt said, could be done for $1 billion over a 65-year period without using "miracle" technologies like time travel or faster-than-light velocity.

"Think of it as putting a message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea. I'll only be 112 when the data comes in," he said.