If all goes as planned, in February 2021 two new rovers – NASA's Perseverance and China's Tianwen-1 – will arrive on the red planet and begin to examine its arid surface .
The first of this type of vehicle to successfully carry out its mission was the Sojourner, of the US space agency, in 1997. Since then, the capabilities and instruments of these devices have improved significantly, but even today they still have certain problems of mobility, especially when it comes to moving through rugged terrain.
At the precise point.
To solve this, a team of researchers from NASA and different universities in the United States is developing the DuAxel robot , a transformable device that can move on its four wheels or split into two machines. The idea is that one remains anchored at a certain point and the other, fixed to the first by a rope, is lowered down the slopes and thus reaches enclaves that, otherwise, would be inaccessible.
This would allow, for example, to deploy the scientific tools just in the desired place, without the need to use an articulated arm.
