With the retirement of the Ingenuity helicopter in January after completing 72 successful flights on the surface of Mars, NASA is testing a new robotic aircraft to send to the red planet.
According to information published in the scientific magazine New Scientist, “the ship would land alone after cutting through the planet’s atmosphere at high speed, and then traveling several kilometers a day loaded with scientific equipment.”
In an interview with the British publication, , he provided some characteristics of the new helicopter, called Chopper.
The Chopper will be a six-bladed drone with a mass of 35 kilos, that is, 20 times heavier than the Ingenuity.
It will have a range of three kilometers per sol (24:40 Martian day), with a payload of up to five kilos.
How will the new Mars helicopter work?
Unlike Ingenuity, which arrived on Mars in the belly of the Perseverance rover, the new Chopper will be able to land on its own.
The aircraft will probably be equipped with a jetpack, a motorized device capable of generating thrust to slow down and control its landing once it enters the Martian atmosphere.
If, on the one hand, the inclusion of the jetpack complicates the design, which has to integrate an additional propulsion system, both light and self-sufficient, on the other hand it brings some advantages.
The main one is to eliminate the expensive sophisticated landing system like Ingenuity’s.
Furthermore, Chopper lands autonomously, without the need for careful selection of the entry point into the Martian atmosphere.
This, in turn, allows the mass of the launch vehicle and the drone itself to be reduced, making them more efficient in terms of fuel consumption.
New projects, old challenges
Before Chopper gets off the ground, the engineering team will have to overcome the same difficulties it went through when developing Ingenuity, considered impossible by many NASA leaders, says Tzanetos.
“They said that physics would not allow us to lift a helicopter into the Martian sky, but we had to convince them for a long time. Time has shown that we were right”, highlights the electrical engineer.
Now, with a hexacopter the size of the Perseverance rover itselfthe difficulties increase.
There is still the problem, overcome by Ingenuity, of powering and controlling a drone in an atmosphere whose density is about 1% of Earth’s.
While our planet’s atmospheric density at sea level is about 1.225 kg/m3, on Mars it is only about 0.020 kg/m3.
As drone propellers push air downward to generate lift, . This causes the propellers to spin much faster.
Tzanetos promises that his team will “fight hard” for NASA to include a new helicopter in the budget for upcoming flights to Mars. But he is optimistic.
