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ESA Shows Off Quadcopter Landing Concept For Mars Rovers

Posted by samzenpus on from the drop-that-anywhere dept.

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.

7 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. GPS on Mars by AF_Cheddar_Head · · Score: 4, Funny

    Really, are you sure it isn't Galileo?

    1. Re:GPS on Mars by frovingslosh · · Score: 4, Funny

      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'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
    2. Re:GPS on Mars by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, 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?

    3. Re:GPS on Mars by faffod · · Score: 4, Informative

      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 hate to break it to you, but ESA is the rocket scientists in Europe, not NASA....

  2. This is not going to work. by SuricouRaven · · 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.

  3. Re:European Probes by Nutria · · Score: 4, Funny

    Being a European probe, once landed it will ...

    Moan and bitch about Spirit & Opportunity spying on it, while in turn spying on economically valuable sectors of Spirit & Opportunity.

    --
    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  4. Horrible Article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here is the official press release, which states the real goal of the project:

    Starting from scratch for the eight-month project, the Dropter team was challenged to produce vision-based navigation and hazard detection and avoidance for the dropship.

    The quadcopter was just a COTS stand-in for testing their software.