NASA: New Mars Rover By 2020

The problem with the interesting moons like Callisto and Europa is that the liquid water oceans are dozens or hundreds of miles below the surface. Sure we might be able to sniff some pretty interesting stuff from ejected water, but the big finds on these moons are going to have to wait for future generations of equipment that can drill through kilometers of ice.

Mars is a reasonably good testing ground for this kind of tech. Not only is it an interesting body with a unique geology and a history that to a point wasn't so different from Earth's and at least a moderate candidate for some kind of life, but it is also considerably closer than Jupiter or Saturn. It serves as a great test bed for the kinds of probes we will likely end up sending to other bodies in the solar system.

I look at the Mars rovers as the best possible test bed for these new technologies, not only in building rugged mechanical systems that can survive intense temperature differentials, dust storms and climactic changes and even hard radiation, but also in the software. I expect with some of the major advances we're seeing in neural net development that by 2020 not only will the next rover be a more sophisticated machine, but it's brain will be considerably smarter too.

When you really think about it, NASA's Mars program is leading the way in highly sophisticated semi-autonomous probes. In a generation, we'll probably be able to launch the grandchildren of Curiosity to places like Titan and give them a far wider range of tools to explore.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/D0UvYRfLf6o/story01.htm

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