The space agency wants to turn the Red Planet into a busy helipad.
Jet Propulsion LaboratoryNASA’s Perseverance rover is currently collecting rock and soil samples in Mars’s Jezero Crater that will one day be returned to Earth. Under the current plan, in 2030 the rover itself will deliver the sample tubes to a Mars lander for transport back home. But, if something goes wrong, a pair of small helicopters will beIf that occurs, the Sample Recovery Helicopters will be the second and third rotorcraft ever to take flight on another planet.
Initially, the Mars Sample Return mission concept included a so-called fetch rover: A robot capable of collecting the samples already cached in tubes by the Perseverance rover. The fetch rover would have ferried them several hundred yards across the Martian surface to a lander near Jezero Crater, where the sample tubes would be transferred to the Mars Ascent Vehicle.
Because Martian air is so thin—about 1 percent of the density of Earth’s—any aircraft on Mars has to be extremely lightweight and have large, fast-spinning rotor blades to provide sufficient lift, he explains. Ingenuity’s repeated flights confirmed NASA’s aerodynamic simulations were accurate–so much so the models will guide how engineers build the new pair of flying robots.Teddy Tzanetos
“We’ve done the calculations, we figured out there’s certain changes we can make to the rotor system to get it to lift more mass,” he says. Now that the Mars Sample Return mission leaders have decided to go ahead with the fetch helicopter concept, Tzanetos and his team are focusing on making those tweaks.
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