NASA's Desert RATS exercise is in full swing, and that means astronauts in mocked-up spacesuits and monster rovers are roaming the Arizona desert to practice for a journey to Mars. Desert RATS is the space agency's high-profile field trip to test the prototypes for contraptions that could go along with the astronauts on honest-to-goodness trips to the Red Planet, or an asteroid, or the moon, or wherever NASA wants to go in the future. The acronym stands for "research and technology studies." This month's exercise has been going on at Black Point Lava Flow in northern Arizona for nearly two weeks. It's due to wind up on Wednesday. Among the hardware being tested are pressurized rovers as big as RVs, designed to house future astronauts as they travel the surface of another world for up to seven days at a time ... Tri-ATHLETE robots that could carry entire habitats on their backs ... a four-wheeled prototype rover base for Robonauts ... and lots of other gadgets. NASA's exploration website has an overview of the exercise, and there's a weblog as well as a Flickr photo gallery and a Twitter account. Inside Science News Service's Eric Betz explains the rationale behind the RATS. NASA Watch's Keith Cowing has been providing regular updates. Check out this nighttime "Image of the Day" featuring the RATS' home base. And for some real-time interaction, tune in the live Desert RATS webcasts from noon to 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday and Thursday, hosted by NASA Edge and the Challenger Center on UStream. More about our future in space:
- Space Review: Debating the future of human spaceflight
- Cross-Check: Hawking's 'new' idea is the same old crap
- NASA: Will scramjets make space station deliveries?
- Next Big Future: Carnival of Space 169
Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case forPluto."
