A plague of robots

Forget lumbering rovers or exotic aircraft. Penelope Boston, the director of cave and karst studies at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology is proposing sending swarms of tiny robots to Mars that would literally hop about the surface using polymer-based artificial muscles that would propel then unward of a meter a jump. The idea has considerable merit, as the tiny robots would be able to reach places a rover could not. More at the MSNBC website.