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Artist’s illustration of future Mars helicopters on the Red Planet featuring Ingenuity (upper right), a sample recovery helicopter (foreground), and a Mars science helicopter (upper center). (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
How can scientists and engineers build off the success of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter to better explore the Red Planet? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as an aerospace executive with more than two decades of research and engineering experience investigated how a next-generation Mars helicopter could conduct groundbreaking science while delivering peak efficiency and performance. This study has the potential to help scientists and engineers develop new methods for exploring Mars with cost-effective and efficient methods.
Here, Universe Today discusses this study with William Pomerantz, who is the Head of Space Ventures at AeroVironment, regarding the motivation behind the study, enhancing key characteristics of their next-generation Mars helicopter, next steps for making their next-generation Mars helicopter a reality, and how he foresees helicopters evolving to explore Mars. Therefore, what was the motivation behind the study?
“My team at AeroVironment developed Ingenuity in partnership with NASA JPL and it was truly a highlight of all our careers to have been part of such an incredible mission,” Pomerantz tells Universe Today. “Once Ingenuity proved that powered flight was indeed possible on Mars, we began to work on more advanced vehicles. Thanks to Ingenuity, we’ve seen that Mars helicopters can cover ground quickly and can reach areas that are impassable to rovers, so an obvious next step was investigating if helicopters could carry additional payloads. When you can put additional sensors, or robotics systems, or any of a million other things onto a helicopter, all of a sudden, you’ve got a highly mobile, extremely affordable explorer that can do real science. It unlocks an entirely new way of exploring Mars.”
For the study, Pomerantz and his team developed conceptual models for next-generation Mars helicopters, including vehicle mass, payload capacity, flight frequency, flight time, flight range, and power availability for in-flight and non-flight. The researchers conducted several simulations to ascertain the most desirable weight for achieving maximum science with a dedicated suite of instruments. For context, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter had a total mass of 1.8 kilograms (3.97 pounds), flight range of 300 meters (980 feet), a maximum flight time of 90 seconds per sol, and average approximately 350 watts per flight.
In the end, the researchers determined that a scientific payload of 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) would be sufficient with a total helicopter weight of 6 kilograms (13.23 pounds), flight frequency of every other sol (Martian day), flight time of 150 seconds, flight range of less than 1 kilometer (0.62 miles), along with an in-flight and non-flight power availability of 30 watts and 25 watt-hours per day, respectively. But what steps can be taken to enhance the key characteristics of this next-generation Mars helicopter to accommodate science payloads larger than 1 kilogram?
“Ingenuity didn’t carry any science payloads,” Pomerantz tells Universe Today. ”Researchers certainly got real scientific value from the mission, but essentially everything on board Ingenuity was necessary for the vehicle to fly, rather than being dedicated science instrumentation. That won’t be true of future vehicles. It's possible to get even more payload on a flying vehicle on Mars, but those vehicles start to look quite different. The team at JPL has shared some information about ‘Chopper’, one of their concepts for a much larger vehicle. But those systems require a bigger technological leap; and bigger leaps typically come with more cost and more risk. Our work is more focused on maximizing the value we can get from the leap we’ve already taken with Ingenuity.”
As Universe Today recently discussed with the proposed CoRaLS mission, the process for going from a mission concept to actual hardware and flying in space requires several steps, specifically with NASA’s Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) ranging from 1 to 9. This process often takes several years, and sometimes decades, as it entails countless proposals, designs, meetings, budget outlines, testing, re-designs, more testing, all while keeping NASA in the loop regarding progress in all aspects of the project.
The length of time typically depends on the size and scope of the mission, with larger and more expensive missions typically taking far longer to achieve success. For example, the joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens spacecraft was first proposed in 1982 but didn’t launch until 1997. Therefore, what are the next steps to making this next-generation Mars helicopter a reality?
“Mars helicopters like the ones we’re talking about here, the ones that can carry ~1 kg of payload, are easy to add onto any other mission going to the surface of Mars,” Pomerantz tells Universe Today. “They hardly weigh anything, and they are super affordable. Ingenuity was built in a little over a year (on time and on budget, I might add), so they are also quick to build. There will be plenty of work to do to build the next system, but it’s all designed to stand on the shoulders of what we’ve already done for Ingenuity (and, to an extent, SRH). We don’t need major breakthroughs, we just need to continue to execute as well as we have in the past.”
While Ingenuity didn’t have any scientific payloads, its 72 flights demonstrated that conducting powered flight on another world—and with a fraction of the atmospheric pressure—is achievable, including 72 flights, almost 129 total minutes of flight time, approximately 17 kilometers (11 miles) of travel distance, a maximum ground speed of 10 meters per second (22.4 miles per hour), and achieving a peak altitude of 24 meters (74 feet).
An example of building off the success of Ingenuity includes NASA’s upcoming Dragonfly mission to Titan, which will be a quadcopter designed to “hop” around Titan’s surface to ascertain if Saturn’s largest moon could host the ingredients for life as we know it. Regarding Mars, NASA and other government space agencies, along with the private sector like SpaceX, have big plans for exploring Mars, including the planned Mars Sample Return mission. Eventually, humans hope to step foot on the Red Planet, and having helicopters capable of reaching locations where humans can’t could prove invaluable for the continued exploration of Mars. Therefore, how does Pomerantz foresee helicopters assisting future Mars astronauts?
“When we have human crews on the surface of Mars, I suspect they will arrive essentially with their saddlebags full of helicopters,” Pomerantz tells Universe Today. “Want to inspect your hab unit or your ascent vehicle? A helicopter can do that easily, roof included. Is an astronaut having a medical emergency during an EVA? A helicopter can hover directly overhead, providing real-time video and helping other astronauts locate their crewmate. And remember, helicopters are going to be extremely affordable and extremely low mass compared to almost anything else on a crewed journey. I think the robot-to-human ratio of crewed Mars missions will be fairly high, and helicopters are some of the most likely and most valuable robots to send along.”
For now, Ingenuity remains the only helicopter to conduct a powered flight on another world and next-generation Mars helicopters remain concepts. However, studies like this help drive the discussion of how we can explore Mars with greater efficiency while achieving scientific goals, along with potentially helping future astronauts on Mars. This was demonstrated in the National Geographic’s Mars series where astronauts frequently used helicopters for a variety of purposes to help them survive and build a thriving Mars settlement.
Like the Mars show, humans will likely not be stepping foot on Mars until at least sometime in the 2030s, so there is plenty of time to develop and test new technologies that could prove useful on long-term human missions to the Red Planet. Perhaps future robotic missions could send more advanced helicopters prior to a human mission to ensure their operational and scientific capabilities. Regardless, Ingenuity helped usher in a new era of planetary exploration with the goal of advancing human knowledge of our universe.
“I always like to acknowledge the incredible support that Ingenuity received from the aerospace community and really from the world at large,” Pomerantz tells Universe Today. “What an honor and a privilege it has been for us to be part of a mission that captured hearts all around the world. Ingenuity was sent to Mars as a “technology demonstrator” mission. Well, it demonstrated the technology alright! Now, it’s up to all of us to do interesting things with it. We’re at a fascinating and extremely fun time right now when everyone knows that flight is possible on Mars, but when it’s still such a new idea that people haven’t fully thought through exactly what they could do with flying vehicles. There’s so much to learn and so much to do, and that’s incredibly inspiring.”
What new discoveries about Mars will this next-generation helicopter teach us in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Laurence Tognetti, MSc
Laurence Tognetti is a six-year USAF Veteran with extensive journalism, science communication, and planetary science research experience for various outlets. He specializes in space and astronomy and is the author of “Outer Solar System Moons: Your Personal 3D Journey”. Follow him on X (Twitter) and Instagram @ET_Exists.
You can email Laurence for article inquiries or if you're interested in showcasing your research to a global audience.