Rovers aren't just for Mars, you know. While Curiosity gets the limelight and the press love, its terrestrial cousins sadly and stoically wander onward, quietly obtaining valuable data about the Earth's poles. I'm talking about two under-appreciated autonomous polar rovers—icy earthbound drones with wheels—that at least recently snagged a write-up in Wired.Cool Robot, a 130-lbs, solar-powered rover launched in 2005, spends most of its time in Greenland, collecting ice and emissions data. It's surrounded by a cube of solar panels, which catches sunlight both from above and refracted from the snowy Arctic surface. It also makes Cool Robot look like a b-list Star Wars droid. See for yourself.Thanks to that solar cube, Cool Robot can cover 300 miles at a time.Its brother, the 180-pound Yeti, is bipolar; it also scouts Antarctica. Here's Wired:Yeti, completed in 2008, is a 180-pound, radar-enabled, battery-powered robot. More worldly than Cool Robot, Yeti has seen both the snows of the Arctic in Greenland, and the Antarctic … Snow covered and deep, crevasses hiding from view are hazardous to teams toting heavy loads of science equipment. GPS-guided Yeti travels ahead of heavier vehicles and uses its radar, housed in an inner tube, to help teams avoid the dangerous cracks. So far, Yeti has peered beneath the sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and will soon be helping researchers map the crevasse-riven area separating the McMurdo and Ross ice shelves, a key crossing for research teams in the Antarctic.Here he is in action:Evidently, scientists are angling to get more of these self-piloting rovers onto the poles, and elsewhere. They hope to use autonomous mobile weather sensors to collect data in harsh, dangerous climes, to cut the risk to human scientists. Yes, the day may yet arrive when climatologists in the field are replaced by bumbly, semi-adorable droids from the 70s sci-fi template.
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