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#1 2023-03-17 17:30:16
- Mars_B4_Moon
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- Registered: 2006-03-23
- Posts: 9,776
Laser scanning cave with robotic spores / eggs a precursor to humans
No human has explored caves off-world. So here was an idea I thought of you would have an explorer robot with a laser made. some kind of craft with eggs to explore the caves of Moon, Mars and Europa maybe a mothership that would be a flying Moth or a Spider or a Fish. It drops these flying / walking eggs at certain distance, on the back of these egg / spore are a reflective surface like a mirror.
Edit I posted this in the wrong subform I think it should go in 'spacecraft probes' or maybe some speculation discussion
The mothership or Mother Moth or Mother Spider then scans the entire cave using the dropped eggs as an exact reference, they can be picked up or called back data is sent back to Earth and a perfect model of the caves can be constructed virtual or in real life.
Out of this mothership is a cable / climbing rope to pull back the mother ship in case anything goes wrong in exploration, the rope is actually a Leaky feeder communication system consisting of a cable run along cave tunnels which emit and receive Low frequency radio waves, functioning as an extended antenna, I thought of sound / sonar for communication inside water but there might be too much noise and reflections.
Here is a quick pic I made not great but you get the idea
Laser will not work as well underwater, they might go into an infinite reflection loop and there are distortions with water, Snell's window or Snell's circle or optical man-hole phenomenon by which an underwater viewer sees everything above the surface through a cone of light, total internal reflection (TIR) a phenomenon where waves arriving at the interface boundary from one medium to another, if the laser scan does work then you can remake a perfect model of the cave of the Moon, Mars, Titan or Europa and practice how you will move around and explore or build before any humans set foot inside.
Does any such robot / device or any similar device already exist for scanning caves?
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2023-03-17 17:34:18)
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#2 2023-03-17 17:42:32
- Mars_B4_Moon
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- Registered: 2006-03-23
- Posts: 9,776
Re: Laser scanning cave with robotic spores / eggs a precursor to humans
I found some vids
they do scan underwater
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DtFd4J-JzU
,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yxVWNjO12Og
but I like my idea better as it does not risk human life and I think the 'eggs' dropped to reflect lasers would help build a far more accurate map of the caves, they also don't need to be eggs and also could be arms or legs sticking out and retract with a reflective surface for reference.
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