What next after Ingenuity on Mars

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Rikkitic

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#312011 7-Mar-2024 14:53

The little helicopter that could was extremely cool, but it was basically just a proof of concept experiment. It probably could not have lifted much more than itself and the minimal light-weight gear necessary for its aerial antics.

This raises the obvious question of what a helicopter that could carry passengers and significant cargo on Mars would look like. Gravity is weaker but the atmosphere is much, much thinner. As far as I know (not much!) the only ways to increase lift are to make the rotor blades bigger or increase their rotational speed, both of which would add weight.

So what would be needed to give a helicopter on Mars the same abilities as one on earth? I have no idea how to do the calculations but I’m sure someone here could. Is this a suitable challenge for ChatGPT?

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Handsomedan

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#3204137 7-Mar-2024 15:05

If my love of science fiction has taught me anything it’s that blue or white lights coming from the rear of the craft will overcome all physics.

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djtOtago

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#3204141 7-Mar-2024 15:18

The bigger question is what do you power said helicopter with?

Not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to run conventional engines (ICE or Gas turbine) and Battery electric would just be too heavy using current technology.

Rikkitic

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#3204151 7-Mar-2024 15:25

djtOtago:

The bigger question is what do you power said helicopter with?

Not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to run conventional engines (ICE or Gas turbine) and Battery electric would just be too heavy using current technology.

Some kind of propulsion system to spin the blades around? Put little jets on the ends and fuel them with oxygen from tanks?

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djtOtago

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#3204155 7-Mar-2024 15:33

Also the speed of sound is much lower on Mars. When the tips on helicopter rotor approach the speed of sound, bad things can happen to the rotor. So overall rotor rotation speed would have to be lower.

PolicyGuy

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#3204163 7-Mar-2024 15:49

Some minor practical details

What are the requirements
You're talking about a helicopter able to carry at least one, probably two, average-sized humans in Mars Surface space suits, plus at least a small amount of cargo. That's got to be a mass of 250 - 300kg.
It's got to have an endurance of at least an hour, preferably two hours.

How are you going to power this helicopter?
Either some sort of fuel (you'd need to carry both fuel and oxidiser, there's damn all of either in the Martian atmosphere) or batteries. Either way, you'll need some significant ground infrastructure: a fuel plant or a decent sized solar array, or both. That means you're way past the "footprints & flags" exploration stage and well into the long term stay settlement phase: that's maybe the 2040s.

How is it going to fly - aerodynamics?
Ingenuity's little 1.2m blades rotated at ~2,500 rpm, and the whole helicopter including the blades, was less than 2 kg mass.
I'm no aerodynamicist, but it seems to me that a blade system that will lift 150 times as much mass as Ingenuity would be maybe 15m to 20m diameter and might need to rotate at similar speeds. At that rate almost the whole blade would be supersonic, with the blade tips well and truly hypersonic. Nobody knows how do design such a lifting foil.
The centrifugal force that the blade would have to withstand, whilst being very long, quite thin and extremely stiff requires it IMO to be fabricated from unobtanium.

It seems grossly unlikely to me that there will ever be an aircraft on Mars capable of lifting more than a few tens of kilograms mass ... unless we terraform Mars and provide it with a real atmosphere.

ezbee

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#3204171 7-Mar-2024 16:13

Mars atmosphere is.

About 0.020 kg/m 3 , about 3% of atmosphere density on earth.
Surface of Mars atmosphere is about equivalent to 35Km altitude on earth apparently.

Then you have dust, and very high energy particles bombarding everything.
Not much atmosphere and no magnetic field, so the Heli a testament to the rad hard electronics.

The little helicopter was seen as quite a risk, and achievement.
It substantially overachieved in what it did.

Unfortunately with the huge funding to return to manned expeditions to the Moon.
Exploration of Mars or Venus, with remote robotic missions may starve for funding.

It would have been so much more interesting to work on improving remote devices to point of returning samples from Mars etc, and other robotic missions at much lower cost.

Handsomedan

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#3204178 7-Mar-2024 16:37

An interesting article from JPL/NASA:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-uses-two-worlds-to-test-future-mars-helicopter-designs

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#3204220 7-Mar-2024 18:59

This tells the other half of the Ingenuity story which I think is bigger news - the hardware they used isn’t rad hardened and isn’t milspec:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/now-that-weve-flown-on-mars-what-comes-next-in-aerial-planetary-exploration/