In 2021, the Ingenuity drone became the first human-made object to fly on another planet. After three years and 72 flights to Mars, Ingenuity has “retired” and that is why NASA has already begun work on a new unmanned aircraft to continue exploring the red planet. And his name is Mars Chopper.
The space agency has shown the first renderings of a huge helicopter concept for Mars. The Mars Chopper has six rotors and could be “the size of an SUV,” according to NASA, which would make it It would allow scientific payloads of up to 5 kilos to be transported at distances of up to 3 kilometers per day, double that of Ingenuity.
In an animation shared by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the huge drone can be seen hovering over a mountainous and rugged landscape.
Considering that Ingenuity was designed to made just 5 flights and ended up making 72the bar is very high for the Mars Chopper, which is why NASA has been working on this project for years.
According to the agency, the concept “remains in the early conceptual and design stages.” Its main task would be to help scientists study even larger swaths of Martian terrain, at relatively high speeds.
In particular, Chopper could go where rovers can’t, which would allow scientists to obtain an unprecedented view of inaccessible areas of the red planet.
Meanwhile, NASA scientists are still trying to get to the bottom of why his Ingenuity helicopter crashed on January 18 of this year, on its last flight.
Before the release of a full technical report, the agency suggested that the navigation system The ship blended into featureless, sandy terrain, which caused him to miscalculate his speed and produce a “strong impact on the slope of the sand ripple.”
“When carrying out an accident investigation 150 million kilometers away, you don’t have black boxes or eyewitnesses,” says Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of JPL, in a statement. Although multiple scenarios are feasible with the available data, We have one that we think is the most likely: the lack of surface texture it gave the navigation system very little information to work with.”
It is still not clear whether NASA will end up sending its Mars Chopper, much larger and even more ambitiousto the Red Planet. But if you ever make the long trip, you’ll have to meet some standards