The largest and most ambitious Martian drone yet could carry kilograms of scientific equipment over great distances and set itself down on the Red Planet unassisted.
NASA is working on plans to send another helicopter to Mars. The craft would land itself after screaming into the planet’s atmosphere at speed, before covering several kilometres a day while carrying scientific equipment.
 |
| The Ingenuity Mars helicopter, the predecessor to Chopper NASA/JPL-Caltech |
Several landers have safely touched down on the surface of Mars using parachutes and rockets to slow their descent. Some have even contained wheeled rovers that could explore the surface. Then came NASA’s helicopter drone Ingenuity. Although it was engineered on a shoestring budget, it managed to make a surprising 72 flights on the Red Planet, covering 17 kilometres during a total of over 2 hours aloft before retiring earlier this year.
Now, the space agency is working on an even more ambitious hexacopter – a six-bladed drone – with a far larger range and payload capacity, called Chopper. Theodore Tzanetos at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who oversaw the Ingenuity project, says Chopper will weigh 35 kilograms – nearly 20 times that of Ingenuity. The drone will be able to cover a kilometre in a single minute, or multiple kilometres in a Martian day, or sol, which is around 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth.
“The idea is to build a hexacopter the size of the Perseverance rover itself that can go 3 kilometres per sol [and] carry 3 to 5 kilograms of science payload pretty much anywhere on the planet,” says Tzanetos. “That’s where we want to take things.”
He says that engineers are also working on a jetpack device that would fire as the drone enters Mars’s atmosphere, slowing Chopper enough that it would be able to spin its rotors, begin controlled flight and carefully choose a landing spot.
Such an approach brings its own benefits and problems, because it adds complexity to the drone, but also removes the need for an elaborate soft-landing system. Its ability to land itself also means that the location Chopper enters Mars’s atmosphere doesn’t need to be as accurate as it did on previous missions, which can reduce the launch vehicle’s weight and fuel use, as it won’t need to make such precise manoeuvres ahead of entry.
This more ambitious programme will need to overcome the same problems that Ingenuity did – how to power and control a drone in an atmosphere around 1 per cent the density of Earth’s – and convince NASA’s management. Tzanetos says that even the concept of Ingenuity was originally seen as unworkable by some. “There are a lot of people that just looked at the fundamental physics and thought to themselves, ‘There’s nothing there, you can’t pull it off.'”
Tzanetos stresses that Chopper itself is still just a concept, with no funding or mission attached. But he says that his team will “fight hard” to make sure that it is considered as an option when future Mars missions are planned. “We’re going to have fleets of aircraft on Mars one day, I’m sure of that. It’s just a matter of time,” he says.