The New Helicopters NASA Is Sending To Mars
By now most people know about the Ingenuity helicopter which has been flying around Mars for over two years now. What people are less familiar with is NASA’s plan and current development of two new more advanced helicopters preparing for a different mission to Mars in the coming years. While Ingenuity was primarily a technology demonstration and has been fortunate enough to help scout for the Perseverance Rover, these new helicopters will have a dedicated mission.
Equipped with wheels, robotic arms, and a few other upgrades, the two helicopters will be tasked with flying around the red planet and picking up sample tubes placed by Perseverance. Specifically, they are part of the Mars Sample Return mission where NASA along with the ESA plan to get Mars samples back to Earth. In this case, if Perseverance was unable to transport the samples to the lander for whatever reason, the helicopters would deploy and gather any available samples.
This is a significantly more advanced process than the current Ingenuity helicopter operations and would be an impressive feat. While plans could still change before this mission occurs, these new mission specific helicopters are still making progress. Here I will go more in-depth into the upgraded Mars helicopters, the help from Ingenuity, what to expect in the next few years, and more.
Two New Helicopters
When NASA was working on a new Rover to explore and gather samples on Mars, they had the ambitious idea of making a helicopter and adding it to the mission. Years later, when Perseverance was launched and began its journey to the red planet, attached to the bottom of the rover was Ingenuity. This small helicopter was meant to attempt the first powered flight on another planet and complete a few objectives. To put in perspective how well this helicopter has performed over the years in relation to NASA’s expectations, an Ingenuity team lead at JPL was quoted saying, “When we first flew, we thought we would be incredibly lucky to complete five flights”. Now the helicopter has flown over 50 times, traveling a total distance of over 12,000 meters over an hour and a half of combined flying time.
This incredible performance gave the agency and its partners the confidence to apply this technology for a very important and ambitious mission. The new rotorcraft, named the Sample Recovery Helicopters are modeled after Ingenuity and share a lot of similarities. They would expand on Ingenuity’s design, adding wheels and gripping capabilities to pick up cached sample tubes left on the surface by Perseverance and transport them to the Sample Retrieval Lander. The idea being, by serving as another method of retrieving samples on Mars, the helicopters would help ensure the best chance of successfully returning a scientifically compelling selection of Mars rock and soil samples to Earth.
On the actual mission, the Sample Recovery Helicopters would take off and land at predetermined sites, or helipads, that have been found suitable and safe, and would use in-flight, map-based navigation to reach the known locations of sample tubes left on the surface. Each helicopter would follow a four-day procedure to recover sample tubes. Day 1: fly to an area near the sample tube. Day 2: drive close to the tube and pick it up. Day 3: fly back to an area near the Sample Retrieval Lander. Day 4: drive close to the lander and drop the tube in the workspace of the lander’s Sample Transfer Arm. Scientists are also currently investigating other potential science or exploration uses for the helicopters following the completion of the Mars Sample Return effort.
Flight aspects, including speed, flight time, range are the same as it is on Ingenuity. The power-to-weight ratio of the device will increase, for which the area of the solar battery and the capacity of its batteries will be increased. The control system of the upper screw will be somewhat simplified, and the engine power will increase. The overall dimensions of the helicopter will be slightly larger. Along with this, high performance processors enabling autonomy, unprecedented mobility through both flying and driving, and a true manipulation capability with a robot hand, can enable much more than sample tube retrieval.
By now, Perseverance has already finished dropping samples and creating a dedicated depot as a backup. Earlier this year, confirmation that NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover successfully dropped the 10th and final tube planned for the depot was received.
The titanium tubes were deposited on the surface in an intricate zigzag pattern, with each sample about 15 to 50 feet (5 to 15 meters) apart from one another to ensure they could be safely recovered. Adding time to the depot-creation process, the team needed to precisely map the location of each 7-inch-long (18.6-centimeter-long) tube and glove (adapter) combination so that the samples could be found even if covered with dust. The depot is on flat ground near the base of the raised, fan-shaped ancient river delta that formed long ago when a river flowed into a lake there. A location and placement that could be easily accessible by the new helicopters. Currently, the Sample Retrevial Lander which would carry the helicopters is scheduled to launch in 2028 and land on the Martian surface in 2030.
New Helicopter Testing
By now a decent amount of testing has been completed on this new hardware. Back in late 2022 for example a model Sample Recovery Helicopter drove and positioned itself over a sample tube during a test in the Mars Yard at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
In addition, a chief engineer of autonomy and aerial flight at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory commented, “Nothing that we do is easy. And this is not easy either. It’s hard but we think it is doable, with effort. The primary challenge here is mass. We have very little air to work with on Mars. That immediately limits the amount of mass that we can carry. It will be a matter of adjusting and accommodating new elements to do something more on Mars” he said.
In the past NASA and JPL needed to increase the rotor speed of Ingenuity which brought some concerns. In this case, a speed increase comes with a number of potential issues. One of these has to do with aerodynamics: A rotor speed of 2,800 rpm, in combination with wind and helicopter motion, could cause the tips of the rotor blades to encounter the air at nearly 0.8 Mach – that is, 80% of the speed of sound on Mars. (The speed of sound on Mars is somewhat lower than we are used to – about ¾ the speed of sound on Earth.) If the blade tips get sufficiently close to the speed of sound, they will experience a very large increase in aerodynamic drag that would be prohibitive for flight. Its special circumstances like this that helicopters have to deal with on Mars.
At the same time, helicopters offer incredible benefits as well. Mars rotorcraft are unique in their ability to reach locations that are otherwise inaccessible to other forms of mobility. They can fly over terrain that is simply not traversable by a wheeled rover as shown by Ingenuity’s flight over the treacherous sand dune fields in Jezero crater. Helicopters can get up close and hover next to terrain features such as crater walls and enter subsurface features such as lava tube skyholes. Because of their low weight, entry capsules carrying a helicopter can be targeted to even the highlands of Mars, with the helicopters flying out the final leg of the entry, descent, and landing journey. For the first time we can have true global access to the red planet.
Aerial vehicles also have tremendous range. While Ingenuity as a technology demonstration was limited to a flight capability of about 1 km per sol, future larger helicopters could have the endurance to allow 10’s of km per sol traverses. With that kind of capability, large scale, close-up exploration of a wide area on Mars becomes possible. Whether it is a thorough exploration of the polar ice caps on Mars or an epic journey along the Grand Canyon of Valles Marineris, Mars helicopters can make these journeys a reality.
A third feature is resolution. Mars has been observed globally from orbit and at higher resolution from rovers and landers in a few locations. Mars helicopters could provide a planet-wide high-resolution observation capability, able to carry a variety of cameras and science instruments, and observing features at the finest level of detail from a distance of a few meters to even as close as a few centimeters.
A fourth element, latent in its initial form on the upcoming Sample Recovery Helicopters, is a true robotics capability. High performance processors enabling autonomy, unprecedented mobility through both flying and driving, and a true manipulation capability with a robot hand, can enable much more than sample tube retrieval. Multiple small payloads can be carried by these types of helicopters, deployed and re-deployed to various locations, to perform a variety of distributed and networked operations – leading to new ways of doing science and technology demonstrations on Mars and facilitating eventual human exploration. There is still much to be learned at Mars. A fleet of rovers and helicopters, scouts and science craft, operated from Earth and early human outposts on the surface and in orbit, can indeed be in our future.
Conclusion
NASA is working on new helicopters for Mars sample retrieval if necessary. Even if the helicopters were not needed for that specific mission, they could still provide a host of benefits in many different forms. We will have to wait and see how it progresses and the impact it has on the space industry.
