In a muggy hotel room off I-40 in Grants, New Mexico, two roboticists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are bent over a mass of electronics, the open body of a robot called LEMUR, short for Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot. LEMUR is designed to climb the porous walls of a cave 150 million miles away, on Mars. At the moment, though, its four multi-jointed limbs are piled in a heap in the closet, beside the complimentary ironing board.
Grants is the perfect place to field test a climbing robot. It’s surrounded by an ancient volcanic lava flow spread across the landscape like a jagged sea of Oreo cookie crumbs. In one corner of the flow, located in nearby El Malpais National Monument, is a network of subterranean corridors known as lava tubes: long, winding caves big enough to drive a subway train through. There are tubes just like them on Mars, only bigger, due to that planet’s weaker gravity. They may be some of the best places in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life.
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