![]() ![]() Not willing to mess with success, and operating under budget restrictions, NASA decided to essentially clone Curiosity for the Mars 2020 rover. And while it was capable of sampling the Martian regolith, Curiosity was not able to collect samples that could one day be returned to Earth.Ĭuriosity did, however, prove that a large rover with a complex mission profile could land successfully and perform under challenging conditions. Curiosity had already made it to Mars by that point, though, and was returning exciting results and glorious photos of the Martian landscape. Unfortunately, a lot of the missions that were to make up MEP were lost to budget cutbacks in 2012, and the only money earmarked for planetary exploration was contingent of being spent on missions capable of returning samples to Earth. NASA launched the MEP to answer the question of life on Mars definitively, as well as to characterize the geology and atmosphere of the planet to prepare for human exploration. The soil chemistry experiments performed by the static Viking landers suggested that life may have been possible on Mars, but the results were equivocal. The MEP was born from the failure of the Mars Observer mission in 1992, NASA’s first attempted mission to Mars since the successful Viking program in the 1970s. The Mars 2020 mission is part of the broader Mars Exploration Program, or MEP. Here’s a look at the next Martian buggy, and how it’s built for the job it’s intended to do. And so the fleet of Martian rovers will be joined by two new vehicles over the next year or so, lead by the Mars 2020 program’s yet-to-be-named rover. You’d think then that sending still more rovers to Mars would yield diminishing returns, but it turns out there’s still plenty of science to do, especially if the dream of sending humans there to explore and perhaps live is to come true. These vehicles have all carved their six-wheeled tracks into the Martian dust, probing the soil and the atmosphere and taking pictures galore, all of which contribute mightily to our understanding of our (sometimes) nearest planetary neighbor. Over the last 23 years, humans have sent four successful rovers to the surface of the Red Planet, from the tiny Sojourner to the Volkswagen-sized Curiosity. The helicopter and rover are scheduled to launch in July 2020 and land on Mars seven months later.While Mars may be significantly behind its sunward neighbor in terms of the number of motor vehicles crawling over its surface, it seems like we’re doing our best to close that gap. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been developing the helicopter since 2013, and eventually shrunk the fuselage to around the size of a softball to help make the drone viable. The agency will test the drone over a 30-day period and try up to four additional flights, eventually hoping to keep the helicopter in the air for as long as 90 seconds and let it roam for a few hundred meters.Ī successful test could open the door to using helicopters as scouts on future missions, surveying terrain that might be difficult for rovers to navigate and even accessing locations that are unreachable via ground travel. NASA hopes the helicopter will ascend to around 10 feet and hover there for around 30 seconds on its first flight. Once the drone has charged its batteries using solar cells and run through some tests, the rover will relay commands to it from controllers on Earth. NASA also packed in a heating mechanism to help the drone survive the frigid Mars nights.Īfter the rover lands, it will place the helicopter on the ground and retreat to a safe distance. That high blade rotation is important to get the helicopter airborne because of the low atmospheric density on Mars - when the drone's on the ground, it'll already be at an Earth-equivalent altitude of 100,000 feet. The drone weighs 1.8 kilograms (just under four pounds) and the dual, counter-rotating blades will spin at around 3,000 rpm, roughly 10 times the rate of a regular helicopter. The agency is bundling an autonomous helicopter with the Mars 2020 rover to test airborne vehicles on the red planet. The next vehicle NASA is sending to Mars nestles somewhere between a rover and a satellite, at least in terms of altitude.
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