In the classic fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs while walking through a treacherous forest so they wouldn’t lose their way. Rovers may one day use a similar trick to traverse other planets without losing their data.
Typically, if a rover permanently loses communication during a mission, all the information that it has gathered is lost. To avoid this, researchers suggest using a multi-rover system in which a smaller rover piggybacks on a larger “mother rover.” The smaller rover would then venture into any especially uncertain territory, such as a cave or lava tubes, deploying sensors the size of an AirPods case like bread crumbs as it goes.
The sensors could then communicate with each other via a wireless network and funnel any collected data back to the mother rover, theoretical physicist Wolfgang Fink and colleagues propose February 11 in Advances in Space Research. As proof of concept, the team built prototype sensors that communicate via Wi-Fi.
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