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Tumblin' Tumbleweed Rovers To Eplore Mars
In Clifford Simak’s 1961 novel, paranormal explorers project their minds across interstellar distances guided by star machines. On a distant planets, the explorers project with themselves mobile devices called Tapers, which are wheeled (treaded) robotic recorders that gather multisensory and environmental information for later analysis back on Earth:
In September 2025, researchers presented results from wind-tunnel and field tests of the Tumbleweed Rover, a lightweight spherical robot designed for low-cost, large-scale Mars exploration. These wind-driven “tumbleweed” rovers can traverse diverse Martian terrains while their onboard instruments record data in real time.
“His treads left no tracks upon the floor as they had left tracks upon the sand dunes before he’d come upon this dwelling place… His pace slowed to a crawl, his treads whispering on the floor, his sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form, recording temperature and time and magnetics and all the other phenomena which existed on this planet.”
(Taper from 'Time is the Simplest Thing' by Clifford Simak)
(Tumbleweed Rover)
“Recent wind-tunnel and field campaigns have been a turning point in the Tumbleweed rover’s development,” said James Kingsnorth, Head of Science at Team Tumbleweed. “We now have experimental validation that Tumbleweed rovers could indeed operate and collect scientific data on Mars."
The prototype has a modular payload bay with off-the-shelf sensors including:
- A camera (capturing sight, shape, and form)
- A magnetometer (recording magnetic fields)
- An inertial measurement unit (tracking motion and orientation)
- GPS (for positioning and timing)
Team Tumbleweed conducted a week-long experimental campaign, supported by Europlanet, at Aarhus University’s Planetary Environment Facility. Using scaled prototypes with 30-, 40- and 50-centimetre diameters, the team carried out static and dynamic tests in a wind tunnel with a variety of wind speeds and ground surfaces under a low atmospheric pressure of 17 millibars.
Team Tumbleweed, is an interdisciplinary group of young, entrepreneurial scientists, has main branches in Vienna in Austria and Delft in the Netherlands. Team Tumbleweed brings together people from over 20 countries.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/5/2026)
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