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MARS _helicopter_Final15

NASA is withal in the procedure of planning the 2022 Mars rover mission to follow up on the massive success of the Marvel rover. While the pattern of the 2022 mission will exist very similar to Curiosity, NASA is looking to improve the suite of instruments and it might fifty-fifty give the rover a little aerial companion in the grade of a helicopter. Engineers at NASA JPL are still testing the Mars copter pattern to see if it will head to the Red Planet with the rover.

Flying lets you lot comprehend much more ground, but rovers have been our but way of getting effectually on Mars thus far. That'south partially because of the possibility of impairment to a flying drone that you can't repair or fifty-fifty flip over from millions of miles away. The master reason this hasn't been attempted yet is that Mars has a very thin atmosphere. That's the aforementioned reason Curiosity needed a crazy rocket sled to land — there'due south not plenty atmosphere for parachutes to exercise the task. A fixed-wing craft would be more power efficient, simply it would take to be huge to get plenty lift to fly. A helicopter, on the other hand, can have smaller propellers that information technology spins faster to generate sufficient elevator.

The helicopter design isn't a magic bullet, though. The Mars copter pattern being tested does withal have very large rotor blades relative to its size. The heart of the robot is a 2.2 pound cube roughly the size of a tissue box. The blades are 3.half dozen feet from tip to tip. The solar powered robot is designed to fly for two or three minutes at a fourth dimension and encompass about a third of a mile (one-half a kilometer). It will be outfitted with wide-angle cameras like a GoPro, assuasive NASA to observe optimal routes for the rover to take across the Martian mural. This could allow the rover to cover three times more territory each twenty-four hours and telescopic out the all-time places to do science.

Mars-2020

Just engineering a solar-powered helicopter is already challenging, just NASA also needs to design an automated arrangement that tin can state the copter reliably. Due to the distance, in that location's no style for the drone to be controlled past humans. It needs to be able to detect a landing zone and prepare down without damaging itself.

There's no guarantee this volition work. The design needs to laissez passer plenty of tests before information technology volition exist added to the mission. If it does, I bet it'll have an awesome Twitter account, and the rover will take its ain official lensman. Information technology won't be restricted to lonely selfies.