April 20, 2007 by Marco Zennaro | 1 Comment
Shape-shifting ‘smart dust’ may explore alien worlds
Thousands of miniscule wireless sensors, or “smart dust”, could one-day be used to explore other planets, swirling across the landscape by subtly altering their shape. At least, that’s the exotic vision put forward in new computer simulations.
John Barker, an electronics researcher at the University of Glasgow in the UK decided to investigate whether a cloud of similar smart dust “motes” could navigate across the surface of Mars from one point to another, simply by modifying their shape.
The complete article here.
Wow, that sounds like Michael Crichton’s novel “Prey”. And I thought the novel was way too sci-fi to even be considered as real science in the near future…