TAKING a lead from social insects scavenging for food, NASA researchers are
planning to dispatch around 1000 tiny space probes to explore the scattered
rocky worlds of the asteroid belt. The probes would drop in on all 2000
asteroids larger than 1 kilometre in diameter and hunt for resources such as
minerals and water.
Next to Pluto, NASA considers the asteroid belt, a ring of space rubble
between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, as the last frontier of planetary
exploration. But sending a single craft to survey the belt would be very
inefficient, says Steven Curtis of the Goddard…
