NASA has a new way to conquer Mars. Robotic bees are here to help.

NASA is developing a nature-inspired Marsbee project to help explore the Red Planet. Experts are creating a robotic swarm of bees. Their mission will be to collect data and then transmit it to the rover’s base, IFL Science reports.

NASA had an unexpected success with its Ingenuity helicopter, which, after completing its five planned flights, had completed 72 missions on Mars, lasting more than 1,000 Martian days. This achievement was a major step forward for flights to other planets, where conditions are very different from those on Earth.

Flying on Mars is a huge challenge. “The Red Planet has much lower gravity — one-third that of Earth — and an extremely thin atmosphere with a pressure just 1 percent of that on our planet,” NASA explained in a press release when Ingenuity made its first flight. In such conditions, flying using conventional techniques is difficult.

NASA’s solution to these challenges may be the nature-inspired Marsby project. The swarm of robots, about the size of a bumblebee but with wings similar to a cicada, aims to collect data and relay it back to the rover’s base. “The migration of flying animals such as monarch butterflies and albatrosses demonstrate amazing long-distance journeys that could inspire new technologies,” explains the team from the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), quoted by IFL Science.

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Equipped with sensors and communications devices, Marsbees will be designed to be as energy efficient as possible. “Our preliminary results suggest that a bumblebee with cicada wings could generate enough lift to float in the Martian atmosphere,” explained UAH’s Professor Chang-Kwon Kang. Moreover, thanks to flexible wing structures and innovative energy-harvesting mechanisms, the power requirements of these devices would be much lower.

Marsbees have additional advantages over other robots – their low weight and size make them easier to transport between planets. In addition, the swarm offers greater reliability because the failure of one robot will not affect the operation of the others. The Marsbee project, supported by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), could revolutionize the way we explore other planets, opening up new possibilities for future exploration missions.