Gadgetory

at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley scientists are developing the next generation of Rovers to explore the Moon and Mars k10 it's a planetary rover it's designed to allow us to explore natural terrains and it's equipped with a number of different robot sensors and scientific instruments NASA's Terry Fong says the sensors make it possible for the robotic rover to see what's around it and where to drive to understand its environment so we use a lot of different cameras up here is a stereo pair so a left camera on the right camera that we use to image the environment we figure out what's safe what's not safe how rough is the environment we also use on top here at this the spinning sensor here is a 32 beam laser scanner it's collecting lots and lots of 3d data in real time to allow us to figure out also you know how far away are rocks how steep is a slope and that sort of thing today scientists in a command station on the other side of the NASA campus is testing the k10 on the simulated moon surface there are couple craters is a small hill here in the next couple of months engineers plan to perform the same test from the International Space Station we've never had robots controlled and a fully you know interactive mode from space station so we're trying to figure out are there any differences are there things that we might be surprised by things which we actually have to plan and then design future systems to be able to handle the goal says NASA is to make robots like the k10 ready for the next manned moon mission in 2020 where they'll use these new planetary Rovers to deploy telescopes on the far side of the moon so it's basically like a very large ribbon cable and you can then pull that out you can stretch this out create these very long runs perhaps fifty hundred meter long antennas that you can then use for radio astronomy and then the robot knows the school it back up one of the experiment is finished yeah in this case for our experiment I'll know what to spoil it back up for an actual mission of the moon what you do is you would actually lay this out that you would connect it up to a central electronics box and then you have a fully functioning radio telescope array bong ads radio astronomy is one of the fundamental scientific interests for NASA going forward the far side of moon is an ideal location for doing Radio Astronomy you know it's radio quiet because you have the whole mass of the moon blocking stray you know signal where you can make observations of really the cosmic dawn so being able to really look far far back in time and try to understand what happened many many billions of years ago in San Francisco I'm Kara Tsuboi cnet.com for CBS News