NASA Looking for Rover Than Can Drive at Night

The American space agency is currently looking into supporting engineering teams that can propose the design of a rover capable of driving during the night as well.

NASA has been looking at ways of conducting space exploration during the night for many years, but thus far all of its rovers have only been capable of driving during the day.

This limitation came from the fact that all of the robots rely on solar panels to harvest and store electrical power. During the night, those reserves become depleted.

But a solar-powered night rover would have numerous advantages over one of its counterparts operating during the day, experts say, given the fact that it would be able to conduct science during situations never before encountered.

On Mars, for example, Spirit and Opportunity both shut down during the night, which means that they cannot observe temperature changes, wind variations, and other such factors modifying their traits when the Sun goes down.

One of the main demands of a contest that NASA is sponsoring is that future rovers must be capable of conducting equal amounts of science during the night as during the day, Space reports.

The contest, a part of NASA's Centennial Challenges competitions, comes with a $1.5 million prize.

At this time, Martian rovers can only conduct one or two nighttime studies each month. “To do otherwise would require much larger batteries to operate during the nighttime hours,” says Matthew Keuneke.

“And that would have made the rovers heavier and […] the launch costs more expensive,” adds the expert, who is a researcher with the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) program.

The initiative is based in Pasadena, California, at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The expert adds that even a few extra kilograms of cargo can potentially make a launch cost several tens of millions of dollars more than initially planned. And there's only so much NASA can invest in its rovers.

“Right now we pick or choose what objects to use with a spectrometer. If we were able to use it more frequently and with less impact, we may discover something that truly surprises us,” Keuneke adds.

“The thing we frequently discover is that the things we don't think are important are actually the important things,” he concludes.