On February 18, 2021, if everything goes according to plan, NASA’s Perseverance Rover will land on Mars. While scrambling to find signs of past habitability, Ingenuity – a small, experimental solar-powered helicopter flying at its bottom – will try for the very first time to explore the possibility of a flight to another world. demonstrate. We may be looking at the future of exploration on the Red Planet.
Back here on earth, others are looking beyond ingenuity. A Mars concept funded by NASA through NASA, the Rover-Aerial Vehicle Exploration Network of RAVEN, is about to sit in its hand like no other. The project will couple an autonomous rover with specialized drones and be sent over a 32 square mile lava field in Iceland as a test run for a future on Mars.
Interplanetary robbers are technological miracles, but they are stuck on the ground. Drones, in one form or another, are the next evolutionary step, and they will be used for more than just exploration. With ships and drills, they will eventually “go somewhere the rover can’t go, and bring something back,” says Christopher Hamilton, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and lead researcher at RAVEN.
The impact that drones currently have on science cannot be mistaken. During the productive eruption of the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii, the government approved the largest peaceful deployment of drones in U.S. history. Led by Angie Diefenbach, a geologist from the American Geological Survey, Cascades Volcano Observatory, dr.
The U.S. Geological Survey today has a dedicated drone program that catches up with universities around the world that they use to reach inaccessible or dangerous places for scientific research. “This is the age of the drones,” says Diefenbach. “We’re going to do so many cool things.”
Not long ago, the most advanced drones were “all in the hands of the military,” said Gordon Osinski, a planetary scientist at the University of Western Ontario and RAVEN team member. Now you can shop pretty competently online or at your local computer store. Little by little he says that drones “change the way we do field work on Earth. And I think it’s definitely going to do the same for other planets. ”
Scientists are getting very good at driving drones down here, but flying on Mars is going to be harder. The airtightness is a fraction of the earth’s, and therefore any mechanical pilot will have to push much more to gain altitude – hence Ingenuity’s test run. While engineers struggled with the challenge at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2014, the Bárðarbunga volcanic system erupted in Iceland. Between August 2014 and February 2015, it spilled enough lava to easily suffocate Manhattan, making it the largest eruption of Iceland in 230 years.
The lava flow boiled ice and water trapped below, and developed a hydrothermal system with hot water sources that became the home of many happy microbes. By 2021, things have cooled down, but remnants of the bastions of life still exist, creating an environment similar to what scientists hope to identify on Mars. Up to $ 3.1 million, NASA agreed with Hamilton that it would be a great place to test the next generation of automated Mars explorers, and RAVEN was born.
There are two components to RAVEN. The first is the rover. Courtesy of the Canadian Space Agency, it is comparable to curiosity in capability and design. It can be remotely controlled by a human (on Mars there will be a few minutes delay between missions and action), but it can also navigate the country alone.
The real renewal of the project is in its infancy. The drone is a carbon fiber hexacopter, capable of flying for about 35 minutes and up to three kilometers and carrying about 20 pounds of scientific equipment. It will act as the more technologically proficient field assistant.
A camera will be one important tool, but for more than just aerial photography. It can take different photos of the same surface function and then send it to the rover, where better processors will make real 3D maps of the site – “a complete virtual version of the environment around the drone,” says Hamilton. This in turn will help to navigate the area accurately and quickly.
The drone also uses a visible to near-infrared spectrometer, which looks at radiation coming from the ground to identify interesting minerals or substances. But the drone has a different killer app.
NASA is laser-focused on bringing pristine Martian rocks back to Earth. Perseverance will dig up 43 stone-sized stone samples and put them in the closet that will be brought to Earth by a series of upcoming NASA and European Space agencies by 2031. While this robot plays Rube Goldberg machine, RAVEN will have a new way test. to seize monsters in Iceland.
“My favorite part of RAVEN is the Claw,” says Hamilton. It refers to a scoop, or a series of scoop designs, that will be attached to the drone. Important rocks are picked up and flown back to the rover, where the Rover’s chemical interrogation technology will see if the rock is fascinating enough to visit the site where it came from, or to see the original context or to get a larger sample. .
Scientists want to use the same concept for their Earthbound drones. ‘The most exciting thing was to see the Claw on it, because that’s exactly where I want to go next year, for the [U.S. Geological Survey] at least, ”says Diefenbach, for applications here. “It got me pretty excited.”
The team’s engineering partner, Honeybee Robotics, is also devising drilling designs to extract small cylindrical cores or grind rock into powder that can be sucked up and flown to the rover.
This year, RAVEN’s hardware is being manufactured and software is being coded while the hardware is being manufactured. The games will start in the summer of 2022, when the rover and drones arrive at the Holuhraun Lava Field volcano in Bárðarbunga.
The actual first test of the equipment reads like the instructions of a practical final exam. An industry team unfamiliar with the site, which will include students, will use satellite imagery to determine where the best for the rover and drones could land. They will instruct both vehicles and, within a set time measured in Mars days, characterize the geology of the environment and identify potentially habitable or even habitable pockets thereof. In addition to testing RAVEN’s technology, the test will determine whether a new team at the site can identify the most astrobiological areas to study – just as a future Mars mission with the drone should do. “I can not participate in the scientific planning of our team because I have the answer key,” says Hamilton, as he already knows the site and the areas with the best potential for exploration. After the trial ends and the team compares notes, they will return them in the summer of 2023.
Hamilton can imagine the time when RAVEN, or something like that, was actually deployed on Mars. At that point, he says, “the possibility exists that the rover would be an astronaut.” Imagine it is not science fiction, but real: space scientists, drones flying over Mars volcanoes, searching for alien bio-signatures in the hazy light of the distant sun, the Earth (and Iceland’s lava fields) a blue dot in the sky.