Future Technology 500

For years, watching various moon rover type vehicles go into space and never come back has felt quite sad. The work, the hardship and the craftmanship that goes into their creation is very satisfying indeed. However, one of the main reasons that many items we send out into space only are able to return their data stems from one factor – terrain. Well, the new Mars rover from NASA looks like it might be about to change all of that entirely.

This comes from the fact that the latest rovers aimed at looking over Mars will come with some kind of sand trap protection system. The old Spirit Mars rover that was sent out in 2009 ended up freezing on Mars as it got stuck in a sand trap. The wheels were unable to get out of the sand, leaving it more or less unsaveable. Now, though, new editions of the rover are going to have a solid solution to avoid that problem.

Prototypes for such a reason have been underway for some time, with the Johnson Space Center in Houston building an impressive prototype that was able to sweep its wheels, crawling as opposed to rolling. Further work has gone into such a development since, with the end result being the latest innovations which are being further forward.

One similar new development is by that of Siddharth Shrivastava, who managed to create a high-quality miniature version of the RP15 model, utilizing 12 motors to help manage its quadrant of wheels. However, this was designed to be able to ‘paddle’ out of tight spot and to safety as and when needed.

This is a big reason why today so many people are happy to invest their time and their effort into things like the space rover program. It offers exciting opportunities to help us slowly but surely overcome the limits that could stop us from achieving even more discovery in space.

The hope is that in time we’ll be able to see such hardware put to good use, offering simple yet effective solutions for getting vehicles out of a tight spot in the future. By having a combination of wheeling, paddling, and even lifting, future rovers should have no problem at all with overcoming the issues they face.

The aim, then, is simple: to make sure that in future we don’t have to worry about something as simple as sand curtailing a multi-million-dollar mission.

Citation

https://www.space.com/paddling-mars-moon-rovers-sand-traps.html

Future spaceships and spacecraft will be nothing like the old Apollo or Soyuz vehicles that took astronauts and cosmonauts to places no man has ever gone before. The pictures, photos, images and future design of the spaceships and spacecraft on this page will show you this.

Future spaceships and spacecraft will be used for tourism, exploration, military and scientific ventures. Just like today’s cars, boats and airplanes, future spacecraft will also come in a myriad of designs where form and function meet along with the technology that propels us everywhere in the solar system we’ll need to go.

The pictures of future spaceships show how scientists and engineers are now designing vehicles to propel us into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), to the Moon, to Mars and beyond. Future space hotels (and other dwellings) in orbit and colonizing the Moon and other planets will also be necessary for our future ventures into space.

Space Tourism

Space tourism as envisioned by Virgin Galactic and Sir Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Airlines plus a company called Scaled Composites shows (pictured above) the VSS Enterprise flying into LEO and giving its passengers a few minutes of weightlessness and an overwhelming look at the curvature of the Earth.

Space Hotel

Future space hotels (such as this concept from Galactic Suite) will accommodate tourists, scientists, government workers and business people all with different positive interests in expanding the world of land and water in which we all live.

Ark 1

Ark 1 from the Lifeboat Foundation is supposed to be a self-sustaining space colony that is meant to keep the human race alive in the event of a global disaster such as nuclear war or major asteroid strike. To debunk the rumors, however, there will not be room to bring animals 2 by 2 onboard. 🙂

Plasma Rocket

Plasma propellant engines, cold fusion rockets or another transformative, disruptive technological form of energy that may not yet be on the scientific drawing boards will propel future spaceships into the outer reaches of the solar system. Pictured above is a NASA VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket).

Mars Spaceplane

This Mars spaceplane picture shows what the future will behold for us as space travel advances from the Moon and space hotels to the farther reaches of the solar system.

Earth Rise

But, no matter how far we venture out into the universe, there will always be an awesome Earth rise awaiting us back home. And this will make ventures into space worth it in the end.

For more information on future space travel and missions see what else there is to learn just by poking around this place.

Credits: Virgin Galactic, Lifeboat Foundation, Galactic Suite, NASA