A small robot that looks and acts like a baby penguin is helping researchers study penguins in a more natural way.
When scientists study any animals in the wild, it usually means a human has to get close to them to gather information. But people make animals nervous, so when human researchers are around, the animals don’t act the way they normally would.
Tag: robot
Baxter The Robot Comes To Canada
He’s not a child, he’s not a person and he’s not a pet. But he’s smart, he can be trained to do a job and he can do it cheaper than anybody else.
MAVEN Spacecraft Takes Off For Mars
This week, a “robotic explorer” left Earth on its way to Mars.
It should get there next September. Mars is more than 700 million kilometres away.
The explorer is going to Mars to try to solve some of the planet’s mysteries.
For instance, why is Mars now a cold, dry planet when it started out warm and wet?
The Associated Press reports that “the early Martian atmosphere was thick enough to hold water and possibly support microbial life.”
Scientists at NASA want to know what happened to change that.
No Signs Of Life On Mars… Yet
Scientists have not found any signs of life on Mars yet, but they say a robotic vehicle called “Curiosity” is helping them learn a lot about the planet’s history and climate.
Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012 after travelling through space for more than eight months.
It was sent to Mars by scientists from NASA in the United States.
Curiosity is a motorized vehicle called a “rover” which is controlled by scientists back on Earth.
It is about the size of a car and has six wheels that allow it to travel across the planet’s surface and climb over sand and rocks.
It also has a robotic arm, cameras, and instruments such as a scoop, drill and microscope that allow it to examine things it finds on the surface.
Then it transmits the information back to Earth.
The main purpose of Curiosity’s mission is to find out if anything could live on Mars, either now or in the past.
On Nov. 2, NASA scientists held a press conference to discuss what Curiosity had found in its first two months on Mars.
