Mars Copter Opens Door For Flight on Other Worlds.

A toaster-oven-size helicopter named Ingenuity spun its rotors and rose 3 meters above the surface of Mars on April 19, 2021, becoming the first craft to perform a powered flight on a world beyond Earth. It won’t be the last.

Three more extraterrestrial fliers are under development at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other space agencies, and many more uncrewed copters, hoppers and floating machines are on drawing boards. These aerial robots could survey the clouds of Venus, search for life on Saturn’s moon Titan and scout out resources for Mars astronauts who might arrive in the late 2030s.

Those missions face daunting technological hurdles, says Theodore Tzanetos, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Flying on other worlds requires ultralightweight materials, autonomous navigation and adaptations to extreme temperatures and different atmospheres.

NASA’s Ingenuity shattered expectations of what a helicopter can achieve on other
planets. Conceived as a lowbudget technology demonstration and scheduled to make
just five flights, the tiny craft so far has taken to the Martian skies dozens of times.

Ingenuity proved that miniaturized components and large, counter-rotating rotor blades make controlled flight possible in an atmosphere that is about 1/100th the density of Earth’s. Along the way, it has provided unprecedented aerial views of the Red Planet’s surface and supported NASA’s nearby Perseverance rover.

Ingenuity’s achievements led NASA to ditch plans to send a European Space Agency rover to Mars to transport soil samples cached by Perseverance so that they can be returned to Earth for analysis. The agency now says that in 2028 it will launch a pair of
new Ingenuity-style fliers, each enhanced with four wheels and a grasping arm to help collect the samples.

There is a concept for a larger copter with six rotors instead of Ingenuity’s two. The Mars Science Helicopter, as the craft is known, would be able to carry up to about 4.5kgs of instruments.

Then there is Dragonfly, a nuclear-powered helicopter in development at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab - APL. In 2027, NASA plans to launch Dragonfly toward Titan, where the atmosphere is four times as dense and the gravity 1/7th that of Earth’s. Under those conditions, a modest nudge from Dragonfly’s 8 rotors should be enough to send the 500kgs science lab soaring through the sky.

“Titan’s just calling out to be flown on,” says APL’s Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, a planetary
scientist at APL and the principal investigator for the Dragonfly mission. Plans call for Dragonfly to take to the air once a month for nearly three years, logging up to 16 kilometers per flight, to explore a landscape dotted with liquid methane lakes, ice boulders and dunes made of grains of tar.

Each time it touches down in a new spot, the octocopter will use its suite of instruments to assess the local environment, seeking out carbon compounds of the sort that scientists believe might be precursors of life. If a location seems particularly interesting, Dragonfly will collect surface samples using a pair of drills.

NASA’s Dr. Landis has conceptualized zero-atmosphere fliers that pack more punch,
powered by bursts from a rocket engine. These “hoppers,” capable of covering dozens
of kilometers at a time, might scavenge local resources so they wouldn’t need to carry propellant from Earth. On Pluto, for instance, “we could scoop up nitrogen snow, heat it up and use it to fuel our rocket,” Dr. Landis says.