Dr Gabriela Ligeza is a former PhD student from the University of Basel and now a postdoctoral researcher at the European Space Agency (ESA). With her colleagues, she recently tested a new strategy for semi-autonomous exploration of planets with a legged robot equipped with state-of-the-art measurement tools. The new system was designed to rapidly investigate multiple targets and collect mineralogical data.

The results, published in Frontiers in Space Technologies, showed that semi-autonomous robots can quickly investigate several targets, identify promising rocks, and return scientifically valuable data for astrobiology and in-situ resource utilization (‘living off the land’).

In this guest editorial, Ligeza explains their findings for a wider audience.

The chemical composition of meteorites and asteroids acts as a kind of fingerprint, providing information about the origin of the building materials that formed the Earth. 

Using a new analysis of existing data, the researchers show that this material must exclusively come from the inner solar system. 

The material that formed the Earth is similar to that found on Mars and the asteroid Vesta. The Earth is thus part of a trend line extending from the Sun. 

This close relationship also enables predictions to be made about the composition of Venus and Mercury, from which we have no known samples.