Last week, NASA announced the formation of the Mars Program Planning Group, which — as its title would suggest — is aimed at getting us back to Mars. The hope is to get another robotic rover on the surface of the Red Planet by as early as 2018, all with the ultimate goal of sending a human to the planet sometime in the 2030s.
But what will NASA’s future rovers look like? I decided to ask Richard Volpe, manager of the mobility and robotic systems section of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL. For future Mars missions, the trick is getting more bang for the buck. “Right now we’re assuming that power is limited,” says Volpe. “The question is ‘What can we do with that power?’”
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