Video Friday: Mars Helicopter, 100 Dancing Robots, and Putin’s Combat Cyborg
In one of the wilder ideas we’ve heard for planetary exploration, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is proposing that we send a little robotic helicopter to Mars as an aerial scout for a rover on the ground. The copter would be completely self-contained, using a small solar panel to give it a few minutes of flight time every day, while simultaneously storing up enough energy to keep itself from freezing to death at night. This is more than just a concept, too: there’s video of the prototype flying in Martian atmospheric conditions which you can see after the break, because hey, it’s Video Friday.