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NASA Mars Robotics

NASA's Drone For Other Worlds 30

An anonymous reader writes: A group of engineers is building a new drone. What sets this apart from the hundreds of other drone development projects going on around the world? Well, these engineers are at the Kennedy Space Center, and the drone will be used to gather samples on other worlds. The drone is specifically designed to be able to fly in low- or no-atmosphere situations. Senior technologist Rob Mueller describes it as a "prospecting robot." He says, "The first step in being able to use resources on Mars or an asteroid is to find out where the resources are. They are most likely in hard-to-access areas where there is permanent shadow. Some of the crater walls are angled 30 degrees or more, and that's far too steep for a traditional rover to navigate and climb." They face major challenges with rotor and gas-jet design, they have to figure out navigation without GPS, and the whole system needs to be largely autonomous — you can't really steer a drone yourself with a latency of several minutes (or more).
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NASA's Drone For Other Worlds

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  • for the first alien to shoot one down with it's plasma shotgun. Will it be arrested for discharging a firearm inside a populated crater?

  • To all the naysayers: this is why we need to put people up there.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Northrop Grumman's planning an interplanetary drone for Venus. [spacenews.com]

  • We used to call that probes. Everything is drone or isn't these days.
  • I built one for the Mars Society, how do I give them one? http://www.robots-everywhere.c... [robots-everywhere.com]
  • Recent NASA info says we can't get past the Van Allen belts -- the radiation will fry a person.

    So, how did the Apollo 11 astronauts get through? Answer: they didn't.

    Stanley Kubrick was hired to fake it. Then he was murdered 3 days after revealing this in an interview (just before "Eyes Wide Shut" came out, which he contractually forced it to come out on the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11).

    See the hints in the Shining: "A11 work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

    Note carefully that the typewriter did not s

  • by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @01:32PM (#50225095)

    You can do this using exactly the same technology that cruse missiles use, terrain following.

    All you need is precision terrain/elevation data and you can create a vehicle that can navigate safely from Point A to Point B using a terrain mapping RADAR. You just match the RADAR image to your known terrain map and voilà, instant location, elevation and orientation information that you use to correct your inertial navigation system. Preplan your probes route and activities and say go to that waypoint, land, do science, and return to base when done.

    "But we don't HAVE the necessary elevation data yet!" you say? I thought we where in the process of collecting detailed elevation data from Mars. Plus, if you have even a small amount of data which is detailed enough to land the craft with, you can make flights and collect additional terrain data using the very same RADAR you use to navigate with and expand your detailed dataset further and further away from your starting point over time. So you'd fly using the inertial navigation system past areas you knew, collect data and return to the area you already know, send the collected data to earth for post processing and receive an expanded detailed terrain map in return then do your detailed science in this new area. Wash, rinse and repeat as many times as possible.

We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it. -- Saul Alinsky

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