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Mars exploration vehicles typically have wheels, allowing them to traverse some challenging terrain on the Red Planet. However, eventually, their systems start to wear down, and one of their wheels gets stuck. The \u201cFree Spirit\u201d campaign in 2009 was the most widely known case. Unfortunately, that campaign wasn\u2019t successful, and now, 15 years later, Spirit remains stuck in its final resting place. Things might have been different if NASA had adopted a new robot paradigm developed by Guangming Chen and his colleagues at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics Lab of Locomotion Bioinspiration and Intelligent Robots. They devised a robot based on a desert lizard, with adaptable feet and a flexible \u201cspine\u201d that, according to their calculations, would be well suited to traversing over Martian regolith.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Planning for traversing tough terrain isn\u2019t limited to rovers that are stuck. Curiosity and Perseverance, perhaps the two best-known operating rovers on Mars, currently spend a lot of their time trying to avoid areas where they might become entangled. This limits their ability to capture any data from those areas, potentially missing out on some cool rocks, like the pure sulfur that Curiosity recently found for the first time on Mars.\u00a0<\/p>\n A lizard-inspired robot, on the other hand, would have no trouble traversing such terrain. It also has some advantages over traversing different types of terrain, such as rocks. Most rovers don\u2019t have enough leg lift to get over medium-sized rocks, whereas a legged robot would, especially one with adjustable \u201ctoes\u201d that would allow it to grip a rock tighter than would otherwise be possible with typical legged robots.<\/p>\n \n