The first inhabitants of the Red Planet in the near future will not be people, but bees. They will try to find possible signs of life on Mars.
Space agency NASA has announced a project to create a robotic bee that can fly on Mars. The idea is still in its infancy and is to replace modern robots, which are slow, bulky and very expensive, with a swarm of sensor-sensitive, fast microbots that can cover a much larger area at relatively low cost.
The so-called Marsbees, the little bots, are "hovering winged robots the size of a bee with wings like a dragonfly," wrote NASA officials.
As Live Science reported, the largest species of bee is 4 centimeters long, and the wings, according to a number of formal scientific descriptions, can range from 3 centimeters to more than double the length depending on the species.
One of the reasons this idea is possible: Mars' low gravity. The planet has only one-third of Earth's gravitational pull, offering the Marsbees an advantage despite its thin atmosphere.
The Guardian said that these "bees" will not only map the Martian terrain, but also collect samples of the planet's air, in the hope of finding methane gas - a possible sign of life. A Curiosity robot on the Red Planet recently detected low levels of gas, Science said, although whether it was biologically produced is unknown.
Bots like these are very rare on Earth, NASA said in a statement, because rotary bots like ATVs are much more popular. But the fold-down wing design allows the team to implement some low-powered, high-performance technology that will be essential on the Red Planet, where bots will have to return to their home base regularly to replenish their balance.
The Marsbees are still in their very early stages, with a team from the University of Alabama working on numerical models and a Japanese team planning to develop and test a prototype microscope. The Russian development team is also invited to join the project.
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