NASA has two teams of researchers working to design a robotic bee that can fly on Mars. The space agency announced the project on March 30. It's in its early stages, but the idea is to replace modern rovers -- which are slow, bulky and very expensive -- with swarms of sensor-studded, fast-moving micro-bots that can cover much more ground at a relatively low cost. Literally called Marsbees, the little bots are "flapping wing flyers of a bumblebee size with cicada-sized wings," NASA officials wrote. As Live Science has previously reported, the largest species of bumblebee grows to be up to 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) long, but the American bumblebee is about a quarter of that size.

It's hard to exaggerate just how successful NASA's Mars Rover program has been. These little vehicles have crawled over different parts of the Martian landscape, sending back invaluable data. But these rovers have some limitations: They move incredibly slowly. In over 2,000 days on Mars, the rover Curiosity has traveled about 11 and a half miles. That's why NASA has approved exploratory funding for an entirely new type of explorer: a swarm of robotic bees controlled by AI.

There is no life on Mars that we have been able to detect so far. But the red planet could be about to look a lot more like Earth, with a swarm of robotic bees sent to buzz through its atmosphere. Space agency NASA has funded an unusual project to create'Marsbees', which are the size of bumblebees with enormous wings, equipped to take samples from the planet. An artist's impression issued by the European Space Agency of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in front of the red planet The inventor of the'Marsbee', Dr Chang-kwon Kang from the University of Alabama, believes they have sufficient lift to hover in the Martian atmosphere, which is around 100 times thinner than the Earth's. His report on the bees states: 'Marsbees are robotic flapping wing-flyers of a bumblebee size with cicada-sized wings.