Nanobots on Mars

摘要

Nasa's Curiosity rover, scheduled to reach the red planet this month, is the size of an SUV for good reason: It's built to carry 165 pounds of scientific instruments over boulders and into gullies. But putting Hummer-size robots on other planets is not altogether practical. For one, it's expensive. (Getting a Curiosity-weight rover to Mars takes more than a million pounds of fuel.) Large rovers are also power-hungry and limited in range. For future missions, some researchers, eager to do more science with fewer resources, have begun looking to nanobots-each one about one-one-billionth as big as Curiosity.