TAKING a lead from social insects scavenging for food, NASA researchers are
planning to dispatch around 1000 tiny space probes to explore the scattered
rocky worlds of the asteroid belt. The probes would drop in on all 2000
asteroids larger than 1 kilometre in diameter and hunt for resources such as
minerals and water.
Next to Pluto, NASA considers the asteroid belt, a ring of space rubble
between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, as the last frontier of planetary
exploration. But sending a single craft to survey the belt would be very
inefficient, says Steven Curtis of the Goddard Space Flight Center in
Maryland.
Curtis’s idea is to dispatch swarms of about a hundred probes to weave among
the rocks gathering data. Each will be loaded with sensors and weigh no more
than a kilogram. He calls the mission ANTS, for Autonomous Nano Technology
Swarm.
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These worker probes would report back to a leader, a probe roughly the same
size but packed with computers to coordinate the swarm’s data. Once a leader has
collected a full load, it transfers it all to a messenger which flies back to
Earth. Curtis is planning around 1000 probes so that some are expendable. “If
you lose one, you lose an individual, not the whole mission.”
The probes would be released from the outer reaches of Earth’s gravity. Solar
sails of 100 square metres would unfurl and carry each swarm on the three-year
trek beyond Mars.
