The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration will consider sending another helicopter to Mars. The new drone will be much larger than the previous one — Ingenuity — and will surpass its predecessor in all respects, starting from the mass and ending with the number of blades. However, the main feature of the future system is that it will be able to land on the Martian surface without the help of other vehicles. Engineers have not offered anything like this before.
Practice shows that it is easier to reach Mars than to land a spacecraft on its surface. The fate of most Martian stations is quite safe, but some were unlucky — they crashed, lost contact with the Earth.
Usually, to deliver a robot to the surface of the Red Planet, engineers use a landing module equipped with either jet engines or a parachute system (often a combination of the first and second). Using the latter method, in 2021, scientists delivered the Perseverance rover and the unmanned robotic helicopter Ingenuity.
The Martian helicopter was created on a limited budget and for the most part from components not designed to operate in outer space or another planet. But despite all the difficulties, Ingenuity managed to surprise the scientific community. Instead of five flights, he made 72. Instead of a couple of minutes, he spent a little more than two hours in the Martian air, covering a total of 17 kilometers during this time.
The history of the Martian drone ended in January 2024, when NASA announced the completion of the mission. The reason: one of the blades is broken.
Inspired by the success of Ingenuity, NASA will consider the option of creating another Martian helicopter in order to continue exploring the surface of the Red Planet from above. Theodore Tzanetos from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who oversaw the Ingenuity project, told NewScientist about this.
The device was named Chopper. Unlike Ingenuity, it will be able to land on the surface on its own directly from orbit. The drone is planned to be equipped with a jetpack, which will be triggered when the drone enters the Martian atmosphere, slowing down the Chopper so that it can spin its rotors, start a controlled flight and carefully choose a landing site.
This approach has its own difficulties and advantages: it complicates the design of the drone, but at the same time there is no need to create a complex soft landing system. This solution will eliminate the need for NASA to carefully select the entry point of the spacecraft into the Martian atmosphere, which will reduce the mass of the launch vehicle, reducing fuel consumption. The rocket will not have to perform a series of precise maneuvers before approaching the Red Planet, which means that you can save on fuel.
Before bringing the Chopper project to life, the engineering team will need to overcome the same problems they faced when they created the Ingenuity helicopter. First, figure out how to power and control the drone in a rarefied atmosphere, the density of which is only 20 grams per cubic meter, which is 61 times less than the density of the Earth's atmosphere (1,225 kilograms per cubic meter). Secondly, to convince NASA management to finance the project.
"Initially, even the concept of Ingenuity was considered impossible by many in the NASA leadership. They said that physics would not allow us to lift a helicopter into the Martian sky, but we had to convince them for a long time. Time has shown that we were right," Tzanetos explained.
So far, Chopper is nothing more than a concept. According to Tzanetos, his team will "fight hard" for NASA to consider the option of a new helicopter when planning future flights to Mars. The engineer himself believes in success.
Tzanetos noted that Chopper will be a six-bladed drone weighing 35 kilograms — almost 20 times heavier than Ingenuity. The device will be able to travel three kilometers in a Martian day (the Martian solar day is called sol, they are about 40 minutes longer than Earth's), while carrying on board from three to five kilograms of scientific payload.
