NASA wants to go to an asteroid. Great! And once NASA gets there, then what? Exploration, of course, since that’s what NASA does. But the microgravity (or minigravity?) environment is a challenging one to get around in. There’s likely not enough gravity to use wheels or treads to drive across an asteroid, and moving from place to place using thrusters would be complicated and dangerous and suck up a lot of fuel. If you’ve taken the time to glance at the picture at the top of this article, you know one potential solution: robotic tumbling cubes that can move by themselves, as if by magic. That’s because their motion is driven entirely from the inside…. [Read more]
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