Sun seekers

In July, a team of engineers from Europe and Japan will launch two small crawling robots into space. This humble experiment may come to represent a major step in the development of an emission-free energy source to meet all of Earth’s requirements.

The robots, one made in Europe and one expected to be from Japan, will be launched from Japan in a small test rocket. When the rocket reaches a height of 220km three daughter satellites will be separated from their mother satellite to stretch out a 40m x 40m Furoshiki net. A microwave antenna will then be switched on and begin transmitting signals to a receiver on the ground, and the robots will spend three minutes crawling across the net, under the eye of several cameras.

Later this month five robots, including two developed by Vienna University of Technology with funding from ESA, will undergo aircraft micro-gravity experiments in preparation for the rocket launch. The experiment could have huge implications for telecommunications, Earth observation and satellite navigation. If it is successful such robots could in future crawl along a large mesh of up to 1km x 1km in space, deploy an inflatable structure to create a rigid frame for the net, before assembling themselves into huge structures such as antennas.