{"id":238178,"date":"2026-06-02T06:03:36","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T11:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/innovative-mars-rovers-swim-through-the-sand"},"modified":"2026-06-02T06:03:36","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T11:03:36","slug":"innovative-mars-rovers-swim-through-the-sand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/innovative-mars-rovers-swim-through-the-sand","title":{"rendered":"Innovative Mars rovers \u2018swim\u2019 through the sand"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/innovative-mars-rovers-swim-through-the-sand.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Some animals can move efficiently beneath granular surfaces. These include the sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard native to the Sahara. It can burrow into the sand and then literally \u201cswim\u201d through the desert sand to hunt or escape predators.<\/p>\n<p>The principles of movement underlying this ability have only been understood for a few years. Researchers at the University of W\u00fcrzburg have now translated the sandfish\u2019s locomotion mechanism into an initial technical solution\u2014an innovative Mars rover that outperforms other models when moving on sand.<\/p>\n<p>The team led by computer scientist Marco Schmidt, Professor for Embedded Systems and Sensors for Earth Observation (ESSEO), is collaborating with researchers from Bremen. The project is part of the VaMEx initiative of the German Aerospace Center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some animals can move efficiently beneath granular surfaces. These include the sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard native to the Sahara. It can burrow into the sand and then literally \u201cswim\u201d through the desert sand to hunt or escape predators. The principles of movement underlying this ability have only been understood for a few years. Researchers [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}