
I have visions of the Wallace and Gromit moon-cooker-alien thingy following Curiosity with a tub of Pollyfilla...
NASA's nuclear Mars truck Curiosity has punched a hole in the planet for posterity with its robotic arm drill. Curiosity's first sample drilling Curiosity's first sample drilling. The shallow indentation on the right was part of its preparations, NASA says. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS The rover bored into a flat, veiny …
I reckon we'll discover that it was a rock.
Surely cracking the rock open would tell you more about the history of the rock, rather than just drilling a shallow hole into it and collecting dust?
But, to be honest, geology never interested me. There's a million times more things we could go looking for on Mars that might actually prove useful. "It had water millions of years ago" doesn't seem to be one of them (though, obviously, it's all science, and might have some third-order-knock-on-effect that brings about some real useful knowledge for exploration).
I'd still be much happier if we were just sending a thousand tiny robots there, and just driving them all away from a central spot. We'd get a lot more area covered, a lot more pretty pictures, find a lot more odd things that deserve closer attention and a failure won't mean failure of the mission.
Or maybe I just want to play "battle bots on Mars", so that when one "captures the flag" so-to-speak by finding something interesting, we can pilot all the rest to swarm over there and claim credit.
"I'd still be much happier if we were just sending a thousand tiny robots there, and just driving them all away from a central spot. We'd get a lot more area covered, a lot more pretty pictures, find a lot more odd things that deserve closer attention and a failure won't mean failure of the mission."
So once your Martian microbot army has wandered all over the place taking pictures, how exactly are they meant to pay attention to all the odd things they find? They'd need to take samples. Oh wait, your microbots aren't equipped with sampling devices. Fit them with sampling devices you say? What form would they take, I wonder? Drills and chemical analysis units, of course! Wait, hold on a sec...
So I'm very interested in hearing what you think you might find by just photographing the planet (which has already been done from orbit of course). The presence of water increases the probability that life has or may exist, which will open up all sorts of philosophical and theological debates, yet alone our understanding of how life works. It also will tell us lots about the early solar system, which in turn will help predict what to find in other solar systems.
Have you ever seen Robot Wars (or similar)? You know the robots that have spikey-hammer-arms? Yes, they're always shit aren't they, barely scratching some ali plate while throwing the attacking robot around and about thanks to Newton. This is (one reason) why they're using drills and not hammers on Curiosity. Merely cracking it open will give you what appears to be homogenous material for the most part, so you could learn very little from it. The drilling isn't used to see what's on the other side, it's to get right down and taste the composition of the rock which will tell you a shit-load about that rock all all it's nearby friends.
Essentially Lee, you need to get your head out of your arse and discover what _is_ being found, not what you think ought to be.
Interestingly, I read an article a while back about the US military working on building microbots that could be scattered over a battlefield to be used for gathering images and sussing the lay of the land. The software and radios that they had were capable of self-configuring into an ad-hoc mesh network, so that part of it should be easy to sort out, even if a significant fraction of the machines don't survive the landing or fail in some other way.
As Helena points out, though, these things aren't really of any use as roving devices. There's a limit to how small you can make remotely-controlled bots while still giving them useful locomotion and other more practical sensors and actuated abilities.
Still, I think the microbot idea could still be pretty useful for future missions as a means of getting an initial idea of local terrain and even provide telemetry data for later, more fully-featured rover landings. The thought of sending an Internet to Mars is pretty cool too, especially if it can self-organise and do a kind of terrain "interferometry" (a fancy word for building a map from multiple viewpoints) locally instead of having to pipe everything back to Earth first. Think about it... Martian Internet! What's not to like about that?