2 Ingenuity-class helicopters to join Mars sample return efforts

The campaign to bring genuine Mars samples to Earth will now include two mini-helicopters.

NASA officials involved with the Mars sample return (MSR) effort announced today (July 27) that they plan to redesign the mission, abandoning an earlier draft that required the European Space Agency (ESA) “fetch rover” to land on the mission. own lander.

NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is expected to remain active when NASA’s MSR lander lands in 2031, will now be tasked with carrying collected and stored samples onto a Mars climbing vehicle. If that fails, however, two helicopters like the Ingenuity, which landed with Perseverance last year, would be a backup option for retrieving the cache itself.

The helicopter will be similar to the Ingenuity in terms of size and mass, but with two key differences, NASA MSR program manager Richard Cook told reporters at a briefing today.

“There will be a landing leg that includes, underneath, the mobility wheel,” Cook explained, saying this new capability would allow the helicopter to “traverse the surface.” Mini robotic arms on each plane will allow drones to pick up sample tubes that Perseverance left behind, if necessary.

Related: 12 stunning photos from the Perseverance rover’s first year on Mars

If helicopters were needed for such work, they would land near the sample tube, roll over to pick it up, then fly to a place near the Mars climbing vehicle. Upon landing, the helicopter will roll closer to the vehicle and drop samples within reach of ESA’s newly announced transfer arm.

The redesign decision means that no ESA rover will land on Mars anytime soon. But the new concept also allows NASA and ESA to complete an ambitious sample return effort with fewer costs and complications, according to the coalition.

“The engineer in me was fascinated by the sample rover, because it was designed to travel much faster than previous Mars rovers, maybe about four or five times faster on the surface,” David Parker, ESA’s director of human and robotic exploration, told reporters. today.

Adding a rover, however, would require “a second launch, a second lander and so on,” meaning that removing the hardware from the manifest “makes a lot of programmatic sense,” he said.

ESA is still building the rover assigned to land on Mars — a life-hunting robot named Rosalind Franklin. The cruiser was supposed to be launched this year on a Russian rocket, but that plan fell through after Russia invaded Ukraine. Rosalind Franklin is now expected to take off no earlier than 2028.

“The engineering team has been working at high speed to find alternative approaches to sending the Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars,” Parker said of the situation, saying different options were being discussed. A special meeting of the European council in Paris in November will allow member states to decide on the best path forward, he added.

Life on Mars: Exploration and Evidence

The European ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin is expected to launch no earlier than 2028 due to changes to its rocket landing and launch platforms. (Image credit: ESA)

Part of the revised MSR plan is still in the works. Officials don’t have a cost estimate yet but suggest that having just one lander going to Mars would be much cheaper than sending two. The helicopters also don’t have a definite primary mission, though they may be tasked with observing the area around a Mars climbing vehicle or observing a rocket as it lifts off from the Red Planet, Cook said.

The new design is driven in part by the impressive performance of other hardware that has outlived its lifespan on the Red Planet, said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

The Curiosity rover, which informed the Perseverance design, will celebrate 10 years on Mars on August 5. Ingenuity was approved for a five-flight plan in its design but has flown 29 times on the Red Planet to date.

There has been a lot of movement in MSR files in recent months. In May, NASA asked the public for comments on environmental assessments when the agency is ready for a draft environmental impact statement later in 2022.

The second lander requirement, now dropped, was itself added only in March after the Mars Sample Returns Independent Review Board said dual lander capability “could increase the likelihood of mission success,” according to a NASA statement at the time.

But the addition of a second lander forced the mission to push the launch date back two years to 2028, and lift off for another two years to Earth until 2031. (That timeline has not changed with the new mission plans.)

NASA also announced during the MSR press conference that the Perseverance rover was sampling its 11th sample on the Red Planet. The sample, a fine-grained sedimentary rock, was chosen for its potential to preserve biosignatures that may be key to helping scientists assess the chances of life on Mars.

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