Tumbleweed rover tests demonstrate transformative technology for low-cost Mars exploration
Reports and Proceedings
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 26-Oct-2025 00:11 ET (26-Oct-2025 04:11 GMT/UTC)
A swarm of spherical rovers, blown by the wind like tumbleweeds, could enable large-scale and low-cost exploration of the martian surface, according to results presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the Division for Planetary Sciences (EPSC-DPS) 2025. Recent experiments in a state-of-the-art wind tunnel and field tests in a quarry demonstrate that the rovers could be set in motion and navigate over various terrains in conditions analogous to those found on Mars.
Artificial intelligence in all its facets is the focus of this year’s Annual Assembly of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, which takes place in Halle (Saale) today, Thursday 25 September, and tomorrow, Friday 26 September. The event brings together renowned experts from various disciplines to discuss current developments in AI research, their possible uses, and what this means for society. To open the event, Dr Lydia Hüskens, Deputy Minister President and Minister for Infrastructure and Digital Affairs of the State of Saxony-Anhalt, and Dr Rolf-Dieter Jungk, State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), will give welcome addresses. All the Annual Assembly lectures will also be livestreamed.
The polar regions of the Sun remain among the least-explored territories in solar physics, yet they play a crucial role in driving the solar magnetic cycle, generating the fast solar wind, and shaping space weather throughout the heliosphere. Limited by the Earth’s position in the ecliptic plane, past missions have only provided oblique views of the poles, leaving their behavior and evolution poorly understood. This observation gap has left three top-level scientific questions unanswered: How does the solar dynamo work and drive the solar magnetic cycle? What drives the fast solar wind? How do space weather processes globally originate from the Sun and propagate throughout the solar system? The Solar Polar-orbit Observatory (SPO), scheduled for launch in January 2029, aims to address this gap by achieving the first direct imaging observation of the Sun’s poles from high heliolatitudes. Using multiple Earth flybys and a Jupiter gravity assist, SPO will reach an orbital inclination of up to 75° (80° in an extended mission), with a 15-year lifetime (including the 8-year extended mission) covering an entire solar cycle. In order to achieve its scientific goals, SPO will carry a suite of remote-sensing and in-situ instruments to measure the vector magnetic fields and Doppler velocity fields in the photosphere, to observe the Sun in the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths, to image the corona and the heliosphere up to 45 solar radii, and to perform in-situ detection of magnetic fields and charged particles in the solar wind. The mission’s vantage point will allow extended observation periods above ±55° latitude, including during the next solar maximum around 2035, when a polar magnetic field reversal is expected. By directly imaging the poles, SPO will provide invaluable insights, revolutionizing our understanding of the Sun and the space weather processes.