Designing vehicles to explore faraway planets is never an easy business, and controlling them from millions of miles away can be even more difficult.
The solution is to create a planetary rover that can navigate, investigate and move intelligently, or reasonably intelligently, on its own.
The Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, working with NASA's Ames Research centre, has designed a prototype that might fill the solo space explorer role. At the moment Nomad is making its way, with help from scientists, around the eastern Antarctic looking for meteor debris.
The director of the project at the university, Mr Dimitrious Apostopoulos, said the rover is intelligent enough to make scientific decisions, including identifying types of rocks and classifying them independently.
Although the rover is fairly inefficient at the moment, it is all part of a learning process for its artificial intelligence-based systems. Even though it needs a bit of help, deploying the rover is better than trudging around the frozen Antarctic yourself.
Because of the problems with the last Mars polar lander, which disappeared without trace, and the time lag when sending instructions across space, Nomad is being left to its own devices as much as possible so it will develop its autonomy systems.
High-resolution cameras fitted to the vehicle, which is about the size of a small car, help it navigate around the terrain.
The cameras identify dark objects against the white background of the snow, and subtle variations in colour and shade allow the robot to tell the difference between rocks and incidental shadows on the ground.
A laser rangefinder is used to judge the distance from the rover to target objects and using a built-in spectrometer Nomad is able to measure the density of the rocks to determine whether they are meteorites.
The big difference between what Carnegie Mellon is developing and what has gone before is that Nomad will be able to analyse data on board and make decisions based on what it finds rather then just sending back large amounts of raw data to scientists.
The next step for the designers is to get the rover to investigate below the surface, and eventually to be able to search over vast expanses and distinguish different types of life. All this will be done without human help or instruction.
Mr Apostopoulos believes the success of Nomad will see its technology used in future space exploration missions. We will have to wait some time for Nomad's first show, however. The technology will be ready in the next few years but it will be 2010 before Nomad features on a real space mission.
Nomad has previously been tested in the Atacama desert in Chile, where it trekked 200 miles across the desert.
Both projects are aimed at developing a vehicle which can operate independently in hostile environments which feature little vegetation, similar to unexplored planets.
If successful the project should break new ground in both planetary and terrestrial exploration with autonomous space buggies searching uncharted planets without the need for human intervention.
Nomad's progress can be charted at www.bigsignal.net