By Peter Weiss
Anthony Colozza hopes to unleash flying robots on Mars. That may sound like the brainchild of a crazed, sci-fi film director, but the proposed bird-size robots are actually a technology designed for serving planetary science. Aerospace engineer Colozza and his colleagues are convinced that the machines, which will fly as insects do, may be the perfect explorers for the Red Planet.
Compared with rovers hobbling over all kinds of terra incognita, unmanned flying machines could peruse much more of a planet and do it faster, say Colozza and other proponents of flying robots. And unlike planetary orbiters that scan a lot of terrain at low resolution, autonomous aircraft would enjoy a closer view and might even be able to drop down at selected spots to examine an area in detail or to take and analyze samples.