Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight (opens in new tab)

If anyone has AIAA paper access (or a workaround ;), they published a ton of details on their guidance, control, and avionics designs at the beginning of this year:

https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2018-0023 https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2018-1849

"The helicopter uses counter-rotating coaxial rotors about 1.1 m in diameter..."

Not to be little it but, in short, a drone.

I presume the rocket scientists are jealous ;)

It says a lot to how routine using satellite navigation aids has become that my first question was why they’re not using GPS.

It would have to be pretty dust/debris resistant, but could the helicopter -- or a simplified version of it -- be used to clear a lander's solar panels of dust?

I recall with previous landers, how solar charging performance would degrade, then pick up after what was surmised to have been a wind storm event.

Sounds a lot like a drone

Tiny works great for agility demos, but I doubt that there would be much agility left once you add any amount of meaningful payload. A battery that lasts longer than a demo video take, sufficiently powered uplink (no convenient wifi or low-power cellular where they are going) and all those sensors for in-situ geological experiments. Because without that, all that jumping around would not get you any data that could not be acquired much easier and with more precision using a simple overhead laser scan. Oh, and much of Mars may not be paved, that little "jump drive" surely needs a reliable surface to push back against.

Where do you get 50% from? It's got landing legs, and will be placed right-side-up to start with by the Mars 2020 rover.

What about jumping robots makes them maintenance-free?

Neat little robot, reminds me of this animal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springtail

I once spotted some 'jumping dust' around a leaky faucet and it turned out that it was 100's of these little creatures. They can jump 100's of times their own height!

OMG that little jumping robot is so cute!

On Mars, gravity + thin air would likely limit the usefulness. But you're spot-on with Venus. Blimps would be great there. Hell, there were articles floating a couple of years ago suggesting you could park blimp on Venus above the corrosive layers of atmosphere, and conditions there could actually support a small base that would extract necessary resources from the atmosphere, and where humans would only need light shielding (+ breathing apparatus). I'm not saying building a cloud city on Venus is a good idea now, but I do think a long-duration mission to study the atmosphere would be, as data from Venus is also useful for studying climate change on Earth.

It sounds like it might be feasible: the atmosphere on the surface of Mars is described as the equivalent of Earth at "100,000 feet" (30 km) but the record for a weather balloon is 53km, and balloons carrying people have gone as high as 40km.

The helicopter being proposed is "the size of a softball", though, and not the main focus of the mission. The high altitude weather balloons have been much bigger and would probably need a dedicated mission.

>Is the air too thin to support any sort of lighter than air vehicle?

Yes

That would be very interesting. I am pretty naive on the topic but one thing to keep in mind is that the force of martian wind is nothing like on earth as the atmosphere is around 1% as dense as ours. For reference, the winds in the Martian was one of the big literary devices used to help the story along but I don't think could actually happen

Aren't they pretty mild despite this, thanks to the very low density of the atmosphere?

I makes me think of the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (best Sci-Fi book series ever!) where the early colonists run into a dust store (really _fines storm_ since the particulate mater is much smaller than dust and gets into everything) that lasts several years.

A little more recent:

https://youtu.be/oJGJEepIOt0?t=38

It's from Red Planet (2000):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0199753/

It looks like it's only going to do one brief flight, so yes, batteries probably are feasible. I'm not sure if it would require more power or less power than on Earth though since gravity is lower but so is air density for the blades to act on.

Yes to all of this but do you assume no one at NASA has thought of any of this? Weird.

It’s about 1% the density of earths atmosphere. The craft would have to be light and have large blades, but that doesn’t seem impossible. The light atmosphere means huge blades could still spin fast without issue. It’s not easy but this is NASA we’re talking about. They made a sky crane to drop a Mini Cooper sized rover on Mars before.

The interesting thing about rotary-wing craft is that they actually work sort of independent of altitude (as long as everything stays subsonic.) As air pressure decreases, lift at a given rotor RPM decreases - but the drag on the rotor also decreases, so the RPM increases and it ends up providing the same amount of thrust. The reason helicopters on Earth haven't flown very high is not because of the rotors, but rather the engines, which require more air than is present at high altitude. For electric motors, that is not a problem.

All heavier-than-air flight on Mars is subject to the same issue, but it's presumably still more efficient than using rockets. If it works, it works.

I expect the real problems would come in scaling it up; I doubt a typical helicopter rotor/head assembly would hold together under the high head speeds needed on Mars (or you could maybe use very long blades, which comes with its own problems).

They've done this already: https://youtu.be/oOMQOqKRWjU?t=41s

Simulating dust kick-up would be easier than constructing a "low gravity" room.

Considering the lag in communication to earth, it'd have to be fully autonomous. It needs to be able to avoid obstacles, navigate visually (that article states a compass won't work with Mars's magnetic field) and find a place to land, in direct sunlight, whenever it needs to charge its batteries.

I'm sure NASA has mapped out some waypoints, but there's no way to really control the actual flight remotely without a human in orbit.

My guess is a normal quadcopter doesn't have a big enough thrust to weight ratio in Mars' atmosphere.

This was started years ago. There are probably already plans for the next stages and quadcopters are probably on the list of ideas.

The cost of failure is so high that these ideas have to be flushed out and tested for years. There is literally no way to fix these robots once (or even if) they make it to their destinations.

Not unless we figure out how to turn off gravity or invent teleportation.

>Where you would normally say the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art201307021...

> If this is the sort of experiment that is getting space on a rocket then I kind of wonder if NASA is out of ideas.

No, it's just your imagination that's limited. This is a good idea to test on Mars. Want crazier stuff? Google Venus blimps, or go and find papers about flying supersonic aircraft on Mars.

> I can't stop thinking about what archaeologists will think about us in a thousand years, they will struggle so much to even come up with plausible theories, much less agree on them.

I guess you're implying we should be spending that money on Hepatitis C, to which I'll answer "no, we shouldn't", as money spent on space is pretty useful there on the margin, so you should look for sources of money elsewhere, where there's just too much of it. And if anything, archaeologists will think we've been dumb to put such absurd amounts of wealth to stupid zero sum games and entertainment, instead medical research, space exploration, and basic sciences. But that's just my guess :).

Are you a markov chain?