NASA has no concrete plans to send rovers or landers to Mars for the first time in over 30 years, focusing its efforts instead on using unmanned aerial vehicles, tech website ArsTechnica reported.
The agency's shift toward robotic aviation will begin with the Space Reactor 1 Freedom mission, known as SR-1 Freedom, which carries a payload of three helicopters to the Red Planet.
The 2.1 billion dollar mission will deploy a payload named Skyfall, featuring three rotorcraft modeled on the Ingenuity helicopter and manufactured by company AeroVironment. NASA announced in March that the United States plans to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft by the end of 2028 to deliver the Skyfall payload to Mars.
Under NASA's plan for SR-1 Freedom, the main module of the cancelled Gateway lunar space station will be repurposed as a testbed for a nuclear-electric propulsion system.
Nuclear propulsion and lunar gateway module
NASA, the United States civil space agency, has relied on ground-based rovers to explore Mars since the late 20th century. The Gateway project was originally conceived as a crewed space station orbiting the Moon under NASA's Artemis program. Following the cancellation of the station, NASA reassigned its primary module to test nuclear-electric propulsion technology, which uses nuclear power to drive high-efficiency ion thrusters for deep space journeys.
The flight technology for the new Mars mission builds on NASA's Perseverance rover mission, which landed on the surface of the Red Planet in February 2021 carrying the 1.8-kilogram Ingenuity helicopter. AeroVironment, an American defense contractor based in California that specializes in unmanned aerial systems, manufactured the small rotorcraft to test powered flight in the thin Martian atmosphere.
Ingenuity completed 72 flights on Mars, covering a total distance of about 17 kilometers over two hours of flight time. The helicopter, which cost an estimated 80 million dollars to develop, was eventually lost due to features of the Martian terrain.
Despite the loss of the aircraft, NASA plans to use technologies developed for Ingenuity for the first delivery of soil from Mars to Earth in human history. The planned sample return mission aims to bring Martian rock and soil samples back to terrestrial laboratories for scientific analysis.
Military applications of Martian drone technology
Aerial technology designed for interplanetary exploration has also found applications on Earth. In June, Dmitry Kuzyakin, chief designer at the Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions, wrote in the newspaper Izvestia that American Hornet drones used by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in frontline areas employ optical odometry technology developed through the Ingenuity program.
Optical odometry is a visual navigation method that allows an autonomous aircraft to track its position and speed by analyzing sequential camera images of the terrain below. The Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions, a Russian organization specializing in unmanned aerial system development and combat application, noted that the Hornet drones, also known as Martian, adapted the camera-based tracking methods originally engineered for navigating the surface of Mars.
