This week marks the eleventh day of the landing of the Mars Rover chance. It’s been an out of this world last the small automaton, and such successful that National Aeronautics and Space Administration is coming up with out what new technologies future missions may embrace. And it's like future rovers might get flying companions.
NASA scientists at the reaction propulsion Laboratory in Golden State have unstrapped a model chopper drone that would be additional to Mars rovers launched within the future.
Because you can’t specifically jet over to Mars to dislodge a rover that gets stuck, National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers should be fully positive of the trail ahead before creating any move. they will use the Mars intelligence activity equipment to require footage of potential routes, however pictures taken from over a hundred and fifty miles away aren’t nearly nearly as good as those shot from simply on top of the bottom. That’s why a drone might be the solution.
The scientists have designed a a pair of.2-pound (on Earth, at least) twin-rotor chopper that's roughly three.6 feet from one blade tip to the opposite. The body is regarding the scale of a tissue box, with four lank legs jab out from simply at a lower place all-time low of the rotors.
JPL says that the drone might the maximum amount as triple the space that the rover will travel in an exceedingly Martian day, and permit scientists to look at completely different areas from the air to work out if they're merit more study from the bottom.
With gravity on Mars adequate three.711 m/s2, roughly a 3rd of the nine.807 m/s2 on Earth, craft weight is a smaller amount of a problem than it's on Earth. Instead, the matter is that the air. gas pressure on Mars could be a little fraction of that on Earth, therefore the comparatively huge blades for the small chopper. Scale models area unit being tested extensively at JPL in an exceedingly chamber to simulate the low-density of air on the world.
The drone should even be fully autonomous, as a result of the number of your time it takes roundtrip radio communications between the 2 planets, anyplace from eight to forty eight minutes. It conjointly has to be hardened to the radiation on the planet’s surface. In alternative words, there’s plenty of labor to try and do before successive Mars Rover is regular to launch, in 2020.
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