ESA Shows Off Quadcopter Landing Concept For Mars Rovers 104
coondoggie writes Taking a page from NASA's rocket powered landing craft from its most recent Mars landing mission, the European Space Agency is showing off a quadcopter that the organization says can steer itself to smoothly lower a rover onto a safe patch of the rocky Martian surface. The ESA said its dropship, known as the StarTiger's Dropter is indeed a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position, where it then switches to vision-based navigation supplemented by a laser range-finder and barometer to lower and land a rover autonomously.
This is not going to work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Mars has an atmosphere. Barely - atmospheric pressure is 0.006 earth-atmospheres. Maybe 0.01 if the weather is right and at a low enough point. You'd get bugger-all lift from a 'copter, quad or otherwise. Even in the nice one-third G, that thing isn't flying. It's hard enough getting something down by parachute - those rovers have to be built to take a nasty impact, because even with a huge parachute and low gravity they still hit the ground hard.
Seven Minutes of Terror (Score:4, Interesting)
If you've never watched "Seven Minutes of Terror," which explains the crazy but successful scheme to lower the Curiousity rover onto Mars, do yourself a favor and go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
It's the best video the U.S. Government has ever produced.
Re: This is not going to work. (Score:2, Interesting)
Nor will GPS help much on Mars. It's like this is a thinly veined cover for developing a military drone for dropping materiel into a battle zone. Everything about it seems geared towards terrestrial use.
Re:GPS on Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position .....
Yup, hate to break it to you rocket scientists at NASA, but there is a slight flaw in this design for use on Mars.
I'd suspect those rocket scientists planned to, oh, I dunno, put GPS satellites into orbit around mars prior to landing the rover?