ULtrikepilotNW Maverick Legend II / JCV-360 / 13M Pacer wing and 16.8M Solairus wing, NW ATF / Simonini Mini 2 plus / 17M Stratus wing, Airborne 912XT tundra / Streak III, Tanarg / Ixcess, NW Apache / GT5, NW Scout XC & new GT6 wing

300 to 350 in trikes, many more in HG

Can't remember them all.  Mostly in PA, MD, NY, NC, WA, MT, ID, SC, CO, VA and HI. Some are private airstrips that do not have publicly known identifiers.

Spacecraft/Rover hybrids

This video is not about flying trikes. NASA is exploring specialized hybrid rover robots for getting around on very low gravity bodies (about 1/1000th G) such as asteroids or Phebos which is one of Mar's moons. This is a cool highlight of my son's research project that is part of his Phd work in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. He has been heading up the work to figure out best means of locomotion once on a low G body. In 0.001G there is insufficient gravity and friction to get around with a wheeled rover so they are looking at a hopping rover. Very proud of my son Ben. Last summer he had opportunity to take multiple parabolic flights each day for a couple weeks at JPL to test out the rover in near zero G. They call these flights the vomit comet and he said it lived up to its name for him for first couple flights. Any way, check it out. Hope you enjoy the video.

Comments

  • Ken

    Neat stuff. The biologist in me wonders why they didn't go with some sort of survace adhesion mechanism?

    Guess thats why I'm not an engineer

     

    Grip

     

  • ULtrikepilot

    Yes, great point Ken. The surface adhesion (or suction) to surfaces is an incredible evolutionary mechanism.  But I believe they want to have a means of moving around regardless of the nature of the surface the robot lands on which could be loose dust, powder or sand.  Although we might tend to think of asteroids or moons as all solid mass like rock, there has been increasing evidence that portions of such bodies may be quite different. Some may contain the equivalent of sand dunes. Craters and depressions may indicate bombardment which might displace loose material. It is really hard to tell from some imagery until we get there.  I would think that surface adhesion methods would have been considered. Hey, maybe a rover could actually carry a real gecko or gecko-like robot.  Personally I find all this stuff as really pushing out on the frontiers of science, and expanding our knowledge by claiming portions of the unknown as part of the known.  Exciting stuff.