NASA's new Sample Recovery Helicopters will make flying on Mars less 'boring'

The space agency wants to turn the Red Planet into a busy helipad.

BY EVA BOTKIN-KOWACKI | PUBLISHED AUG 5, 2022 6:00 AM

NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently collecting rock and soil samples in Mars’s Jezero Crater that will one day be returned to Earth. Under the current plan, in 2030 the rover itself will deliver the sample tubes to a Mars lander for transport back home. But, if something goes wrong, a pair of small helicopters will be poised to swoop in, as NASA’s Mars Sample Return team announced in late July.

If that occurs, the Sample Recovery Helicopters will be the second and third rotorcraft ever to take flight on another planet. And their inclusion in the Mars Sample Return mission, a joint effort by NASA and the European Space Agency, could signal the beginning of a new chapter in Mars exploration—one in which small, lightweight helicopters regularly zip around the Red Planet.

The news of adding helicopters to the Mars Sample Return mission comes just over a year after the first aircraft in history took powered flight on another planet, when NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter ascended to the Martian skies in April 2021. Since then, the experimental rotorcraft has taken 28 more flights, far surpassing expectations.

“The whole point of Ingenuity was to be that Wright Brothers moment that leads to some future down the road of additional aerial exploration of Mars,” says Teddy Tzanetos, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Team Lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Ingenuity’s goal was to make flying boring… Now we can just keep doing boring flights and doing exciting things with boring flights.”

More:
https://www.popsci.com/science/mars-sample-return-ingenuity-helicopters/