Spirit and Opportunity, these two rovers are one of humanity's first physical connection to Earth's neighbor, the red planet. Our design, which incorporates much from the Mars Explroation Rovers' design, brings a fairly unique design ideas which will assist its mission to explore the hazardous environment that is the Aitken Basin in search of ice.
Our design is more compact than the mars rovers, measuring only 75cm x 50cm x 50cm, while still harboring similar capabilities to that of the Mars Exploration Rovers. Similar to the mars rovers our design's computers will be heated by plutonium dioxide pellets. Our rover will also share a similar drive train to the mars rover Our many rovers will be powered by Lithium-ion batteries,but unlike the mars rovers; will not have any SOLAR panels to recharge its battery, due to the lack of sunlight needed for SOLAR power. Due to the inability to recharge its batteries, the rover will have to run on battery power alone. All together the robots mission on the surface of the basin is expected to last no longer than several hours. During this short period of time, the robots will have to work quickly at completing their task.
Their tasks includes obtaining a sample from the craters. The robot will move around the basin until it finds an area cold enough to freeze water. Once it finds an ideal location it will begin to collect samples. To do this our robot will use a drill similar to the Rock Abrasion tool used on the mars rover to first grind an clean away the surface befor boring into the surface of the craters. Before the drill begins drilling, a seal will be made between the robot and target surface. After the target has been sealed and drilled the robots will blow air into the hole then suck up the sample into a sealed container. In the sealed container the rovers will change the enviorment in the container to 1 atm of pressure and heat the sample to a temperature of 22 degrees Celcius. If the sample melts we then we are fairly sure we have found water in the moon. Since water melts at a certain temperature and pressure, this is the way in which we know we have water. All of the robots deployed for this mission will contain the hardware neccessary to connect to each other through an AdHoc network. The data gathered by the robots will be sent throughout the network to a central hub dedicated to relay the data gathered to a satellite which will send the data back to earth