LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE >> The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is seeking $30 million from NASA to build a Mars drone expected to survive at least one month in a harsh environment, a study scientist said Wednesday.
For the past year and a half, JPL scientists have been studying the Mars Helicopter, a low-flying scout that could triple the distance Mars rovers travel in a single Red Planet day, study scientist Matthew Golombek said.
“It’s too cheap not to put it on (a rover), or so we hope,” Golombek said, adding that the Mars 2020 rover is budgeted at $1.5 billion and the Curiosity rover mission is working with $2.5 billion in funding.
The 2.2-pound prototype looks like a medium-size, cube tissue box. With a 3.6-foot blade span, the Mars Helicopter would provide a much-appreciated aerial view to complement the limited field of vision currently available from cameras aboard rovers.
Although orbiters provide supplemental data for scientists and engineers who plan a rover’s path, the highest resolution is about 25 centimeters per pixel. Scientists could identify objects that are about 3 feet across. But to distinguish key outcrops and to help plan a pathway, NASA needs something that could provide photos with 10 times that resolution, Golombek said.
Enter the drone, which would be able to take photos at a resolution of 3 centimeters per pixel.
“High enough to see all key rocks and paths,” Golombek said. “Because the helicopter is so flexible, the resolution is just how high we fly. We can even land and take close-up images of rocks.”
The proposed add-on is expected to fly and take pictures for about three minutes a day. It could travel about 1,970 feet in one flight and would typically hover about 130 feet above the surface of Mars, Golombek said.
“It just seems like this is kind of the future we ought to try to do here. It’s that enticement of what could come in the future,” he said. “If we could just get a chance to demonstrate it and have this opportunity, we think that there could be lots of things in the future that could use this and revolutionize our exploration capability on Mars.”
He looked back at rover history. The 1997 Mars Sojourner rover was as big as a microwave oven, but it paved the way for the way for Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity, Golombek said.
“The design and concept are the same,” he said. “You just need that one chance to get it on Mars.”
The proposed drone would carry a battery, computers, a camera and a solar panel. If approved, it would be the first time aerial flight took place on another planet.
Although NASA did not include the Mars Helicopter in the seven instruments on the Mars 2020 rover payload, the space agency asked Mars 2020 project managers to work with the helicopter study team, Golombek said, to see if the drone could be added without interfering with the other instruments, valued at about $130 million.
Currently, Mars rovers could travel about the length of a football field in a Mars day because limited visibility from onboard cameras and orbiters prevents scientists from planning a longer route. But a drone would help the rover become more efficient; it would be able to drive across two or even three football fields, Golombek said.
One of the biggest challenges for the Mars Helicopter is the ability to land safely. Every day, scientists will have 7 seconds of terror, said Bob Balaram, chief engineer of Mobility and Robotics Systems at JPL.
“Because this thing is going to take off every day and land every day, we want to make sure we have a bulletproof landing system,” he said in a video. “Landing is the riskiest part of any mission.”
Right now, Mars rovers are like people who need to put on glasses. The Mars Helicopter would sharpen the spacecraft’s vision so it could better identify areas of interest that it could make a beeline for.
“(The rover) would spend most of its important time doing that work (of collecting samples for future retrieval to Earth) and not driving around,” Golombek said. “So it’s making a much better use of the rover.”
