Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are working on a possibility in which they can create a windbot, a robotic probe, which can stay afloat in a planet's atmosphere for a long time. The windbot will prove extremely beneficial for gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.

The windbot will be made without wings and hot-air balloons. The engineers will assess the idea as a part of one-year study costing USD 100,000. NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts programme-funded study will properly investigate how future spacecraft could stay aloft and harvest energy.

The researchers are quite positive that the study will pay way for atmospheric science on gas giant planets. Experts said that planets like Jupiter and Saturn are quite different from the moon and Mars because they do not have sold surface on which a spacecraft can land.

An effort was made in 1995 when NASA's Galileo spacecraft dropped off an atmospheric probe into Jupiter, but it was able to survive for just about an hour. Principal investigator of the windbot study, Adrian Stoica, said that a windbot will be having rotors on many sides of its body that would be having the ability to change direction.

"A dandelion seed is great at staying airborne. It rotates as it falls, creating lift, which allows it to stay afloat for long time, carried by the wind, We'll be exploring this effect on windbot designs", affirmed Stoica.