AX-1 Ares
Autonomous surface exploration
- Status
- Qualification campaign — Atacama analogue site
A pressure-tolerant rover that maps, samples and navigates unknown terrain without a single command from Earth.
AX-1 Ares is built for the twenty-minute light delay. It perceives its own terrain, decides its own route and reports what it found. Six independently articulated legs-on-wheels cross regolith, scree and ice without a human in the loop.
- 01Unsupervised traverse planning
- 02Sub-surface ice detection
- 03Sample caching and hand-off
- 04Swarm hand-over to Vertex
Terrain reasoning
Onboard models predict slip, sinkage and shadow before the wheels ever move. Ares refuses routes it cannot recover from.
Self-repair
Any of the six drive units can be isolated in flight. The remaining five re-plan gait and keep the mission alive.
Science on demand
A drill, a spectrometer and a sample cache share one bay. Instruments swap in the field in under nine minutes.
AX-1 Ares
Figures are current qualification values and are updated as campaigns close.
- Mass
- 412 kg
- Range per sol
- 2.4 km unsupervised
- Autonomy
- Level 4 — no ground loop
- Thermal envelope
- −140 °C to +70 °C
- Payload bay
- 38 kg modular
Talk to the team behind this system
Programme enquiries, technical documentation and partnership requests.