NASA To Send Two More Helicopters To Mars For 2033 Sample Return

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) hope to take custody of the samples Perseverance has been patiently collecting and return them safely to Earth, and they'll need the help of two more helicopters. IFLScience reports: NASA and the ESA are collaborating on putting a lander on Mars that is capable of taking off again and making a rendezvous with an orbiter which will then bring the cargo back to Earth. Rather than collect its own samples, the return mission will take over those collected by Perseverance, and the biggest change to the plans lies in how that transfer will occur. The project has not got funding yet but the space agencies are refining their plans. In a quest for the backing they need new details have been announced, along with a return date -- 2033 -- only slightly further off than 1969 was when Kennedy promised a Moon landing "before this decade is out."

Previously the Sample Return Lander was planned to carry a Sample Fetch Rover and its associated second lander. Instead, NASA and the ESA are now proposing to equip the lander with two helicopters based on the phenomenally successful Ingenuity. They will be able to traverse the gap between the Mars Ascent Vehicle and where Perseverance left them much more quickly and having two offers redundancy if one fails. There's also a possibility that Perseverance could deliver the samples directly to the Mars Ascent Vehicle if it is still operating when the ascent vehicle lands.

If everything goes to plan the Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander will launch in 2027 and 2028 respectively. Although delays are common for space missions, the fact Ingenuity has continued to operate -- and even set records for its flights -- well beyond its anticipated mission time has increased the sample return team's optimism.

Consumer electronics

[Åke Malmgren]

What impresses me the most is that it runs on bog-standard 18650 lithium cells and phone CPU and sensors. It has demonstrated the viability of both flight and consumer-grade electronics on Mars.

Re:Consumer electronics

[solidraven]

Yes and no, modern CMOS process nodes are inherently less radiation sensitive because the active device area of the chip has less depth and is smaller, and the silicon tends to be thinner, which translates into less bulk. So there's less chance for radiation to interact with the chip. However, it helps being stuck on a planet with some protection, you wouldn't want to run that phone processor in interplanetary space, odds of it encountering a catastrophic fault are quite high. That being said, many space-grade electronic chips are the same as the commercial ones, but packaged differently and tested to hell and back according to various military or agency standards. It's more of a question of trust and testing than actual component quality. For example, you could just as well build the same system to industrial ruggedized specifications - with some radiation hardening by circuit design - and try to qualify the whole shebang for flight, this is pretty much what companies like SpaceX and all the earth observation start-ups are doing. You could of course try to skip all those steps, but at the end of the day you don't want to be outgassing in the fairing and coating the optics of the other missions in the ride share, etc.

But a lot also depends on the launch vehicle used. Like at a previous job I designed a couple of PCBs for a satellite that's scheduled to launch on a Vega C, and I can tell you that the shock and vibrations coming off that thing are not for the faint of heart. As a result we had to test a lot of components to levels far beyond the military standards, which had the funny result of actually breaking the test setups themselves. I would suspect the Atlas V is quite a bit nicer, and Ingenuity wasn't built to fly more than a few times, so they probably deemed it an acceptable risk to just go with tested commercial hardware.

And redundancy

[DrYak]

That being said, many space-grade electronic chips are the same as the commercial ones, but packaged differently and tested to hell and back according to various military or agency standards. {...} For example, you could just as well build the same system to industrial ruggedized specifications - with some radiation hardening by circuit design - and try to qualify the whole shebang for flight.

That and redundancy.
Having three or four redundant system doing the same thing and majority voting is yet another strategy.

Re:

[solidraven]

Yes, this, though I think folks tend to misunderstand how this works in practice. I've never actually implemented pure-sang voting logic as shown in conceptual diagrams, the issue is that the voting logic itself is also susceptible to the same failure modes. It leads to interesting design conundrums that are sadly not really suitable for the comments section here.

Re:

[Agripa]

Yes and no, modern CMOS process nodes are inherently less radiation sensitive because the active device area of the chip has less depth and is smaller, and the silicon tends to be thinner, which translates into less bulk. So there's less chance for radiation to interact with the chip.

It is not just having less capture volume. Smaller process sizes require gate insulators with a higher dielectric constant to control leakage, and this also results in more charge stored in a smaller volume, so the charge deposited by a radiation event has less effect. Soft error rates in DRAM leveled out a couple generations ago, and maybe even improved, instead of increasing as originally predicted.

still risky

[argStyopa]

While the current mission really has deserved the title "phenomenally successful" the investment and tradeoffs for flight vehicles in your mission still involves pretty high tradeoffs and rather high risks.

We still should probably bank our expectations of such systems with a pretty high chance of failure.

Re:

[timeOday]

To me the helicopters and bringing back a sample are less exciting than simply making a return trip at all. Making a round trip is blazing the trail for humans to visit mars, and it would be a pity if that were overshadowed by coming home 'empty-handed.'

We already have Mars samples

[Cyga74]

We pick them up in Antarctica all the time. Yes, samples with context would be more scientifically useful, but we are talking multiple missions at multiple billions of dollars each. Not a good use of very thinly spread planetary exploration. Johns Hopkins went to Pluto for ~300M$. We could easily dedicate a mission to every planet in the solar system, maybe twice over, for what those rocks are going to cost us. P.S. China recently announced they are going to return Mars samples two years earlier than