Tires on the ground ...

I believe there's a piezoelectric gyro compass that comes in at about a gramme.

I think that it might be good to get the people that did the Beagle project on board. The guy that raised the funds for it is a t.v. natural.

Once we have a sketch of our bot, I can knock up a 3d model of it if you want. I'll stick a logo on it and make it into a mock up advert for some company, as a hint of how a company can use its sponsorship to good effect.

An example of my 3d stuff.

Stoat,

Not bad. One or more prototypes, either real or virtual, are of course absolutely necessary. CAD is cool. In some ways (cost especially) a virtual prototype is superior to a real one.

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Try this:

FOUR WHEEL ROVER

*) a rectangular body, 4 cm by 3 cm by 1 cm.
*) an axel at the front and the back, about 1 or 2 cm away fron the body
*) balloon tires on each axel, about 5 cm in diameter and 3 cm wide

Top, side and front views with dimensions?
Several 3D views, perhaps with a familiar object for size comparison? (Can you use a real photo of the Martian surface from one of the rovers as the background for some of these? Can you make it look like our rover is really there?)

MONO-WHEEL BALL ROVER

*) a sphere about 1 meter in diameter. The surface is a framework rather than a solid. (Like the hexagonal and pentagonal joints between the patches that comprioze the surface of a soccer ball.)
*) an internal axel connects two diametrically opposite points.
*) a rectangular "rover package" (same dimensions as for the 4 wheel rover) is suspended from the center of the axel, about 25 cm below it.

HOT-AIR BALLOON ROVER
?
Hmmm. Similar to the ball rover, but much larger. 100 meters in daimeter? Same rover package, but no internal axel, attached internally with "ropes" or "strings". And of course the surface has to be solid (and air tight) this time.

Cameras might be mounted on or near the surface of the air bag?

OTHER ROVER CONCEPTS
?



Regards,
LB

A few thoughts about the hot air balloon rover. Caution - highly speculative, even for a kook.

Buoyancy in the thin Martian atmosphere is going to be a big problem. And so is keeping the air hot.

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If we could replace the air with vacuum, the heating problem goes away and the buoyancy is maximized for any given volume. Once the bag has been opened to full size it is stable and requires no energy to maintain (like the spherical crew cabins of deep sea exploratiuon submarines), but getting it to go from it's initially folded transit configuration to its fully expanded operational configuration would take a lot of energy. Unless ...

The transformation from transit config to operational config occurs in space. Now all we have to do is figure out how make a light weight structure that can begin life folded, expand to a sphere later (trapping vacuum inside), and then remain spherical and leak-less in a 0.01 bar environment.

Such a structure would have a good chance of being able to survive reentry if the entry angles (multiple passes) were right and if the surface to mass ratio was large enough.

===

But how would you control this type of rover? Especially altitude.

I'm pretty sure that last idea is a non-starter, but you never know. Someone might find a way to make it work.

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More realistically, there is water (ice) at the Martian poles, and with water we can make hydrogen. It won't have to be heated and is buoyant in CO2.

Now all we have to do is design a robotic miner. Lets see, scoop up some white stuff (um, a robotic prospector will be needed to find the richest ore), heat it to get rid of the CO2 ice, heat some more to melt the water ice, electrolize it to extract the H2, store it (might as well store the O2 as well, for later use), repeat the process.

When enough is available, fill a balloon.

Repeat the process.

LB

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by MarkVitrone</i>
<br />So ya'll can't see the image I posted? How do I get one on there then?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">See my previous message to you and Rich's added comment. -|Tom|-

Yep, I can make it look like it's on the surface of Mars. There's loads of stuff on balloons on Mars from a google search. Two types, one a helium balloon that can stay up for a year, the other, a mini mongolfier that can only stay up for one day. Though, I think we could think up a way to heat it for night time flight.

I don't understand what you mean by a vacuum balloon, surely that's impossible.