With the success of the Ingenuity helicopter that became the first aircraft to achieve controlled flight on another planet, NASA and the European Space Agency are shifting plans by sending a couple more helicopters to the planet to complete the Mars Sample Return mission.
The years-long endeavor that went operational with the landing of the Perseverance rover in 2021 on Mars looks to bring home soil samples collected by the rover by landing more hardware on the planet capable of collecting Perseverance’s haul and flying it off the planet.
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the mission will no longer be flying what would have been a British-built “fetch rover,” which was originally planned to act as backup in case Perseverance had issues traveling to the planned dropoff site for its collected samples.
Instead, NASA will send two Ingenuity-class aircraft as backup.
“We have a path forward using a revised and innovative architecture,” Zurbuchen said. “We reached our decision based on new studies and recent achievements in Mars that allowed us to consider options that frankly weren’t available to us one year ago.”
The shift to helicopters came after the proposed “fetch rover” would have had issues fitting alongside the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) on the same flight, and would have required more than one launch to get all the hardware on the planet.
“It’s less organizationally complex, and we believe now that we have an architecture that again is simpler and it is going to position us for success based on the analysis we’ve done,” said Jeff Gramling, NASA’s Mars Sample Return program director.
Back to a single-launch plan, the Sample Return Lander will carry the two updated helicopters, but more importantly the MAV that will be built by Lockheed Martin to get collected samples back off the planet. Also flying up is an ESA-built mechanical arm that will transfer samples into the MAV before launch. Managers hope the arm can just pluck the samples directly from Perseverance, but if the rover can’t get close enough, that’s where the backup is needed.
“The plan has always been to use Perseverance,” Gramling said. “We have competence that that we can count on Perseverance to bring the samples back and we’ve added the helicopters as a backup means to assure that in the event of a Perseverance failure that we can still bring samples back.”
The helicopters would be slightly different in design that Ingenuity including little wheels so they could potentially move over the surface without taking flight. They would be capable of traveling a little less than 1/2 mile from the lander, which is the distance Ingenuity has already proven it can fly.
Current plans are for the lander to launch from Kennedy Space Center in 2028 for a Mars arrival in mid-2030. After completing the sample collection, the MAV would then launch off Mars in early 2031, which could make it the first rocket to be launched off another planet. Once it’s back in space, the MAV will be captured by an ESA-designed Earth Return Orbiter spacecraft, which would bring Martian soil to Earth in 2033.
Perseverance has been doing its job traveling about Mars’ Jezero Crater collecting samples in the last year. It traveled to Mars with 43 tubes for samples, and the plan is to deposit the first 10 tubes, which have already been sealed and stored, in the crater as a backup for safekeeping, and then fill up the remaining tubes to bring to the Sample Return Lander.
“These represent an amazing suite of materials,” said Meenakshi Wadhwa, the Mars Sample Return principal scientist. “The latest one, in fact, is a fine-grained sedimentary rock that ... has the greatest potential for preserving biosignatures potentially. We have a diversity of materials already in the bag so to speak, and are really excited about the potential for bringing these back.”
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