In 2009, after five years of exploring Mars, NASA's Spirit rover hit an unexpected snag: a Red Planet sand trap.
After it cracked through a hard layer of topsoil, Spirit was doomed to spin its wheels with Mars sand up to its hubcaps. NASA engineers spent months trying to free the robot through remote maneuvering, but the Spirit rover was ultimately unable to escape, and it went silent in 2010.
Researchers are now working on new software that they say could help prevent other interplanetary explorers, such as NASA's car-size Mars rover Curiosity, from running into similar quagmires.
"There’s a lot of knowledge in civil engineering about how soils will react when subjected to heavy loads," MIT’s Karl Iagnemma, a principal research scientist in the department of mechanical engineering, said in a statement.
"When you take lightweight vehicles" — like rovers — "and granular soils of varying composition, it’s a very complex modeling process," Iagnemma added.
The researchers refined the model with performance tests in a lab, which included rolling a spare wheel from Spirit's twin, the Mars rover Opportunity, over coarse and fine soil. The team also tested Artemis against real-world scenarios, steering rover-like robots in the Mojave Desert's Dumont Dunes.
"Think about the difference between beach sand, which you can walk on and even play volleyball on, and cake flour," Iagnemma explained in a statement.
"There are goals for taking the rover into places that are more difficult to travel, like dunes and steep slopes," Iagnemma said. "That time hasn't really been reached yet, so there’s a little time to get the model refined for Curiosity."
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