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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.

2 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.