Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Space engineers are exploring a “Dropter” to further surface research of the Red Planet.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has undertaken the work under the StarTiger project – a task that involves developing and demonstrating a European precision-landing capability for Mars and other targets.

This latest team was hosted at Airbus Defense & Space’s facility in Bremen, Germany, joined by engineers from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Spin.Works – an aeronautics company in Lisbon, Portugal, and Poland’s Poznań University of Technology Institute of Control and Information Engineering.

StarTiger stands for ‘Space Technology Advancements by Resourceful, Targeted and Innovative Groups of Experts and Researchers’ working within the Agency’s TRP Basic Technology Research Program.

Vision-based

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.

It has to identify a safe landing site and height before winching down its passenger rover on a set of cables.

This sound familiar for those that survived “seven minutes of terror” brought to you by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover?

The Skycrane that lowered Curiosity rover onto Mars showed the potential of this approach, precisely delivering rovers to their science targets while avoiding rock fields, slopes and other hazards.

Commercial components

According to an ESA overview of the work, the dropship was customized for the project from commercial quadcopter components, with a smaller drone used for preparatory indoor testing.

Using GPS and inertial systems to fly into position, it then switched to vision-based navigation supplemented by a laser range-finder and barometer to land its rover autonomously.

This demonstration having proved the concept, the dropship approach is now available for follow-on development by planetary missions to come.

Perhaps this concept might also find use for future expeditions to Mars – astronaut-guided drones to distant or dangerous spots on the Red Planet.

For a video view of this work, go to:

http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2014/07/Dropship_offers_safe_landings_for_Mars_rovers