Abstract
The Tumbleweed Rover, currently under development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, is a large, wind-blown, inflated ball, which carries an instrument payload in its interior. Such rovers offer an effective and simple means of gathering data over large spatial extents of Earth, Mars, and other solar system bodies. Tumbleweeds could prove to be a safe and economical way of deploying instruments such as a ground penetrating radar or a magnetometer in numerous hostile environments. The latest version of the rover was recently deployed in Greenland, where it completed a more than 130km autonomous traverse across an ice sheet. Communicating via the Iridium satellite network, the rover in question successfully and reliably relayed live GPS, temperature, and pressure data to a ground station at JPL for nearly ten days. The follow-on rover is currently being readied for a traverse from the South Pole to the coast of Antarctica some 2000km away. The Antarctic test is set to take place in February of 2004 and will serve to verify Tumbleweed as an effective means of harvesting data in extreme and remote settings.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings |
| Pages | 388-395 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Volume | 1 |
| State | Published - 2004 |
| Externally published | Yes |
| Event | 2004 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings - Big Sky, MT, United States Duration: Mar 6 2004 → Mar 13 2004 |
Other
| Other | 2004 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | Big Sky, MT |
| Period | 3/6/04 → 3/13/04 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Aerospace Engineering