Mocup is a tiny, adorable remote-controlled robot built from a Lego Mindstorms set with an off-the-shelf Beagleboard computer for a brain and a webcam for an eye. The machine is not fundamentally different from many other RC robots – except for the fact that its controller operates it from space.

The cat-sized robot can do little more than move around, avoid obstacles, and transmit video. It's mostly a testbed for communications to help humans in orbit and robots on the surface of a planet work seamlessly together. On Oct. 23, astronaut Sunita Williams sent commands from the International Space Station to Mocup – which stands for the Meteron Operations and Communications Prototype – telling it to travel around an obstacle course in Germany. The test may seem mundane but Mocup represents the first step in dramatically redefining how we discover and investigate the universe.

Image: The Lego Mindstorms-built Mocup robot, which was recently tested by the European Space Agency. ESA

To most people, exploration means the kinds of things that travelers did in the past – Captain James Cook charting islands in the vast Pacific Ocean or Robert Peary and Frederick Cook planting a flag at the North Pole. The 1960s and '70s Apollo landings, with their flags and footprints legacy, were a continuation of this idea and many people assume that this is how future planetary exploration will proceed.

"An ‘explorer’ looks to us like Columbus, Magellan, or Lewis and Clark,” said astronomer Dan Lester from the University of Texas at Austin. “But should that be true anymore? I think not. Those people weren't wired, and if they were, they would have done what they did in a very different way. It actually takes some cultural courage to give up that old historical definition of exploration and look at it more honestly. Can we do that?”

Rumors are currently swirling that NASA may soon announce plans to send humans back to the moon and then, onward, to an asteroid and Mars. While this immediately invokes visions of moon bases and the first footsteps on Mars, the truth is likely to be very different.

Nowadays some scientists and engineers at NASA and other space agencies are taking a second look at historical exploration scenarios. In the past, robotic and human exploration have been seen as rivals, we either do one or the other. Some in the spaceflight community have said we can do everything with machines while others argued that exploration is a man's job. But there's another option. The still-nascent field of telerobotics, where humans operate robotic surrogates from afar, means that our next exploration efforts will be quite unlike anything seen before.

With ever-improving computing power and communication protocols, astronauts could float in a space station in orbit around the moon or Mars, donning exoskeleton controllers to teleoperate robots in real time. These probes would drive, fly, drill, dig, scoop, and gather material faster and with more precision than current probes controlled from Earth. The best part of humans, our powerful brains that can identify the perfect geologic rock sample and make decisions on the fly, would be combined with all the advantages of robots – their advanced cameras, suites of instruments, and bodies that aren't prone to degenerative problems like blindness and bone loss after months of space travel. One day our mechanical proxies could even help humans visit places that would destroy our bodies, like the hellish surface of Venus or the frozen ocean of Europa.

“I don’t want to replace the humans in space with robots,” said NASA engineer Geoffrey Landis, who works with the Spirit and Opportunity rover science team and writes science fiction. “But I think it’s a good way to start. Because we do have robots and the robots are getting much better, while the humans are evolving much more slowly. Let’s not do humans or robots, let's work together.”

The future will be one where human cognition visits another planet via machine while our bodies remain high above it. Welcome to planetary exploration rebooted or, perhaps, de-booted.

NASA is an exploration agency but there are currently several competing ideas as to what their destination should be. A plan that started development in 2004, President Bush’s Constellation program, would have built an enormous new rocket and tons of new hardware to enable a moon base and future Mars mission. Constellation, sometimes referred to as “Apollo on steroids,” would have also incurred enormous costs. The Obama administration canceled the effort in 2010 and decided NASA should avoid the deep and potentially dangerous gravity wells of planets, focusing instead on zero-g points around the moon or an asteroid. But vestiges of the old Constellation program remain.

Congress was all for ditching the moon and Mars plans but decided to keep building the shiny new rocket (maintaining employment in many of their constituent districts). The Space Launch System, which is scheduled to be ready for human crews in 2019, will be the most powerful rocket ever built, capable of bringing astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, where the space station sits, for the first time since the Apollo days.

This puts NASA in a conundrum. “Once you’re out there, then what do you do?” said astronomer Jack Burns from the University of Colorado. Within a decade, we may be able to get people in the vicinity of the moon but “there’s not enough money in the budget to build a human lander.”

Space funding is flat. NASA is not projected to get much more than its current $17.7 billion per year for the next five years. This makes efforts that don’t require human landings on other worlds much more attractive. Burns is part of the new wave of scientists and engineers that are re-thinking exploration. He helps run a consortium called the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR) that is looking at missions where astronauts teleoperate robots on the lunar far side to conduct scientific investigations.

Under such a project, NASA would use its big new rocket to get astronauts to the Earth-moon Lagrange 2 point, where gravitational forces from both bodies cancel out and allow a spaceship to sit tight without expending fuel. From here, a crew could stay in continuous contact with mission control on Earth while floating 40,000 miles above the far side of the moon, an area never explored by Apollo. Perhaps as early as next decade, three astronauts could visit L2 in NASA’s Orion spacecraft. It’s possible that there they would meet up with a deep-space habitat derived from leftover ISS parts that NASA is currently planning.

From their vantage high above the moon, the crew would release a flotilla of rovers and probes to the lunar surface and direct them to interesting geological areas, such as the South Pole Aitken Basin. As one of the largest and oldest impact basins in the solar system, Aitken would provide valuable information about the heavy asteroid shellacking our planet received during its earliest days. A human operator would drive the rover around and select several 4 billion-year-old rocks, corresponding to a time when the first single-celled life forms appearing on Earth. If the crew could return such rocks back to a lab, scientists might be able to figure out the origin story of terrestrial life.

Image: NASA and the LUNAR consortium's K-10 Black rover, performing tests in a crater in Canada. Matt Deans

Another project that researchers envision would use a remote-controlled robot to roll out 33-foot-long sheets of thin plastic studded with metallic antennas. These structures would act as a giant radio antenna, listening to signals from the earliest stars and galaxies. Scientists currently have little information about the time between the smooth universe just after the Big Bang and a billion years later, when the cosmos was full of stars and galaxies. Earth’s radio frequencies are jammed up with noise from garage door openers, radio, TV signals, and other technology so the lunar far side provides a clean window to this early history of the universe.

In the summer of 2013, NASA will begin telerobotics field tests at Ames research campus in Mountain View, California. Astronauts aboard the ISS will control a robot named K-10 as it travels over the surface and deploys a roll of film antennas.

“The future will be one in which an astronaut leads a team of robots,” said Burns. “They will be pioneers for what is going to be the new way of exploring in space and other planetary bodies.”

Image: A possible view of a human crew inside NASA's Orion spacecraft controlling and operating a robot on the lunar far side from a Lagrange point high above the surface. Lockheed Martin Corporation

Almost Being There ——————

Traditionally, there has been antagonism in the spaceflight community between those who believe humans are required for exploration and those advocating for robotic investigation of other planets. Human spaceflight proponents – mainly those who see advancing out into space as the rightful destiny for our species – say that only humans can experience things like adventure, risk, and courage. Robot enthusiasts – mostly scientists whose chief concern is getting data – counter that human missions are complex, expensive, and potentially deadly.

In the heyday of Apollo, there was no question about who would go to the moon. Only human footprints on the lunar surface would show our technological (and therefore cultural) superiority to the Soviets. But the idea of some sort of teleoperated human-robot hybrid mission was also out of the question. This was mainly a constraint of technology.

“Today, a lot has changed,” said engineer Terry Fong, who directs the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA’s Ames center. “Computers are much more competent, with different interesting sensors such as laser scanners. We’ve had more than 40 years of development in the field of robotics.”

The smartphone likely sitting in your pocket has more computing power and advanced cameras than what Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin arrived on the moon with in their lunar lander in 1969. We have robotic self-driving cars that build instant three-dimensional LIDAR scans of their surroundings. The development of telerobotics has been particularly speedy. Modern surgeons can now operate on a patient from across a room and officers in the Pentagon can order a drone kill from across the world.

The history of space telerobotics starts in the 1970s, when the Soviet space agency deployed their bathtub-shaped Lunokhod rovers, which drove across the moon’s surface under direct control from Earth. Though the light travel time between the moon and Earth is about two-and-a-half seconds, Russian hardware slowed the communications delay down to about 10 seconds. Even worse, the engineers were guided not by video but with low-resolution still images that updated every 20 seconds or so.

With such long latency, the typical human reaction is to over-correct, said engineer Josh Hopkins of Lockheed Martin’s Human Space Flight Advanced Programs, which is developing NASA’s Orion spacecraft. During modern simulations of similar latency conditions, controllers end up essentially “drunk driving on the moon, weaving back and forth.”

The only other major telerobotics test was the German space agency’s ROTEX arm, which flew in 1993 on the Space Shuttle Columbia and was teleoperated by astronauts in space as well as engineers on the ground. But considering the advances in robotic technology and the cost of landing on another planet, the field is now gaining interest from many in the spaceflight community. Culturally, the divide between humans and robots is also lessening, with many advocating for a “third way” that combines the best of both worlds.

Image: A couple of sim-astronauts inside their space station above the lunar surface control a robot. Boeing

"If you said 10 years ago that we’d like to do telerobotics in space, the people at NASA headquarters would say: ‘That’s just stupid, we’re the agency who land people on the moon," said Dan Lester. "Lately, it’s become so obvious that landing human beings on other planets, at least for now, is pretty unaffordable."

Lester is something of an evangelist for telerobotics, looking at how it can reshape and redefine our exploration efforts. In May, he helped organize a symposium at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center dedicated entirely to telerobotics and its potential in future exploration.

The main way that telerobotics differs from current robotic exploration, such as that done by Curiosity and other rovers, is that it places human cognition right where the action is. Light takes between four and 20 minutes to travel between Earth and Mars – depending on the relative distance between the planets – so Curiosity has to be careful and doesn’t usually drive much faster than a crawling baby. On a given work day, NASA sends a list of commands for Curiosity to execute in the morning and then receives word about the robot’s progress at the end of the day.

“It’s almost like doing exploration by overnight FedEx,” said Hopkins. If engineers could bring the light latency time down near human reaction times, about 200 milliseconds, driving Curiosity would be “more like playing a role-playing game with a pretty good DSL connection.”

A rover controlled directly by humans in real time would greatly enhance the science potential of any mission. Steve Squyres, lead scientist for the previous rover duo, Spirit and Opportunity, has famously stated that a human geologist could do in a week what the rovers did in five years on Mars. Perhaps humans in orbit could do even more. For instance, a human landing party would only be able to explore out around 100 miles from their touchdown point. Astronauts floating high above Mars could place and control robots anywhere – the South Pole, Valles Marineris, Olympus Mons – all at once.

Remote-controlled robots would be just as capable as humans, and possibly more so, considering that astronauts would be stuck inside of clunky space suits. Robots could move swiftly over the surface of Mars, using dexterous human-like hands to pick up and identify rocks. Operated by an astronaut in orbit plugged into a large exoskeleton, it would be almost like being there.

Mocup, the diminutive Lego robot mentioned earlier, is the first phase of an ambitious European Space Agency project called METERON, the Multi-purpose End-To-End Robotic Operations Network, which will test sophisticated communications and human-machine interface technology for future exploration. In 2014, ESA scientists hope to fly an exoskeleton to the International Space Station that an astronaut would wear over their arm to provide haptic feedback – essentially a sense of touch – from a robot on the ground.

“Nobody has done haptics in space,” said engineer Andre Schiele from ESA, the principal investigator for METERON robotics. Haptic feedback has been shown on the ground to improve teleoperated devices and “we want to show that task performance is equally improved when used within a microgravity environment.”

Such a skeleton could one day help astronauts with detailed construction projects, plugging in or connecting components, on the moon or Mars. This version of space exploration looks much more like the movie Avatar than Star Trek. In addition to saving money, it keeps humans out of harm’s way. There's no landing party but just think – no more red shirt deaths!

Image: A prototype of the exoskeleton arm the European Space Agency is building to control robots from space. ESA

Image: A rover deploys one leg of a radio antenna on the far side of the moon. Such an antenna would allow astronomers to pick up signals from the formation of the first stars and galaxies. Joseph Lazio/JPL/Caltech

But Will It Play in SciFiLandia? ——————————–

Admittedly, this does not look exactly like the science-fiction scenarios of future exploration we were promised. There is no swashbuckling Captain Kirk wooing green space babes or even a Martian equivalent of Neil Armstrong, taking mankind’s first step on another world.

“I think most people in the human spaceflight community are not comfortable with the idea of exploring without all the way being there,” said Dan Lester. “It’s a sociological and psychological reason.”

Without the thrill and adventure, could Congress or any international government body approve such a program? Is this a mission the public could get behind? It probably seems to many that traveling the 140 million miles all the way to Mars and then not descending the last 100 miles to the surface would be a waste. But there are many reasons why this is not the case.

For one, the price tag of any Mars mission quickly escalates to many tens of billions of dollars, a large part of which comes from carrying a lander and tons of supplies out of Earth’s gravity well to the Red Planet. Such a price tends to induce sticker shock in both lawmakers and the general public and unknown developments could drive it up further. Constellation’s Altair lunar lander, which would have been five times the size of Apollo’s lander, would have also needed tens of billions just to develop – part of the reason it was quick to receive the Congressional axe.

Image: A deep-space habitat holds human crews who communicate simultaneously with both the lunar surface and mission control back at Earth. Boeing

But these don’t even start to address the numerous expensive engineering challenges of a manned Mars mission. Currently, we lack the technology to get a human landing party to the surface of Mars. We also don’t yet know exactly how to build a habitat or a set of spacesuits that could sustain people on Mars for a year and deal with the constant barrage of radiation and dust. There is some indication that both lunar and Martian dust are far more toxic than previously assumed. This is not to say that these challenges can not be met but its just to point out that we are a little bit farther away from descending those last 100 miles than we might wish to be.

In contrast, a telerobotic mission would only require one vehicle – the same spacecraft takes people to another planet, keeps them in orbit, and then returns them to Earth. Similar spacecraft could shuttle crews to the moon, Mars, Venus, or anywhere else in the solar system, rather than designing specific landing vehicles tailored to the rigors of each destination. And there would still be many opportunities to learn about living in space. Sustaining human crews around other planets comes with its own engineering challenges and would provide valuable data about long-term deep-space missions.

Anyone who sees this as some sort of lesser or compromised vision should remember that technology is disruptive and often challenges ideas we have long taken for granted. The future of exploration is certain to look very different than it has in the past.

Perhaps our culture has already changed enough to make robotic avatars controlled by humans in orbit seem perfectly normal. These days, most people comfortably live with the idea of disembodied cognition. We watch live videos of our friends on the other side of the planet through a Skype window. We take on the roles of virtual surrogates in videogames and online RPGs. Geoffrey Landis related a conversation he had with artificial-intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, who berated him saying, “You NASA folks are so old fashioned. You think people are excited by humans in space, but talk to any 10-year-old and they’re excited about robots controlled in virtual reality.”

If one day we decide to colonize other planets, our robots will have paved the way. They will have been the explorers. But we wouldn’t have simply been passive players, waiting back at home. We would be there, exploring with our hearts and minds, if not our bodies, on the ground.

"NASA is bound to the word exploration," said Dan Lester. "Everything that NASA talks about that’s worth doing, they use the word exploration. That’s what makes NASA important. But the advances in our technology are literally redefining the word exploration.”