With more and more focus on future missions to Mars, students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University are pitching in to help with exploration of the Red Planet. A group of students recently built a rover that uses lidar to navigate over the Martian terrain. Lidar is similar to radar, only it uses laser pulses to determine the distance of an object and to create 3-D images of landscapes.
Jerry Hass, the assistant team leader, explains how their rover could help astronauts on Mars:
The Riddle students recently tested out their rover in a cave system.