Meet SpaceHopper, a three-legged hopping asteroid explorer
Apollo mission astronauts who visited the moon between 1969 and 1972 found a hopping motion useful for navigating its surface, where the gravity is one-sixth of Earth’s.
Today, robots are playing a leading role in space exploration, and some are taking cues from those bunny-hopping astronauts.
That includes SpaceHopper, a three-legged robot designed for exploring microgravity environments, like the surface of asteroids.
Developed by university students at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, it bends its legs to propel itself off the ground.
As it careens through the air, it flails its limbs like a falling cat trying to right itself, to stabilize itself in midair and land on its feet.
“We just can’t just send humans into space to do tasks that might be dangerous,” masters’ student Valerio Schelbert, who worked on SpaceHopper as a systems engineer, told CNN. “But we can build robots that could do this task for us.”
