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February 18, 2021, if everything is going according to plan, NASA’s Perseverance rover will land on Mars. While he searches for signs of past habitability, Ingenuity – a tiny experimental solar-powered helicopter that hitchhikes on its underside – will attempt to demonstrate the possibility of flying into another world for the very first time. We may be looking at the future of exploration on the Red Planet.
Back here on Earth, others are already looking beyond ingenuity. A NASA-funded next-generation Mars mission concept, the Rover-Aerial Vehicle Exploration Network or RAVEN, is about to be put to the test in a challenge unlike any other. The project will combine an autonomous rover with specialized drones and will be sent through a 32 square mile lava field in Iceland as a test for a future on Mars.
Interplanetary rovers are technological marvels, but they’re stuck to the ground. Drones, in one form or another, are the next evolutionary step, and they will be used for more than just reconnaissance. With buckets and drills, they’ll end up “going somewhere the rover can’t go, and bringing in something,” says Christopher Hamilton, University of Arizona planet scientist and lead RAVEN researcher.
There is no doubt that drones are currently having an impact on science. During the prolific eruption of Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano in 2018, the government authorized the largest peaceful deployment of drones in American history. Led by longtime drone advocate Angie Diefenbach, a geologist at the US Geological Survey’s Cascade Volcanoes Observatory, they were used to take a close look at lava fountains, tracking the slippery progress of the rock in fusion and even help people escape their homes in the dead of night.
Today, the US Geological Survey has a program dedicated to drones, catching up with universities around the world that use them to reach places inaccessible or dangerous for scientific research. “This is the age of drones,” says Diefenbach. “We’re going to do so many cool things.”
Not so long ago, the most advanced drones “were all in the hands of the military,” says Gordon Osinski, a planet specialist at the University of Western Ontario and a member of the RAVEN team. You can now buy it online or at your local computer store. Little by little, he says, drones are “changing the way we work in the field on Earth. And I think it’s definitely going to do the same for the other planets.
Scientists are getting very good at flying drones here, but flying on Mars will be more difficult. The density of air is a fraction of that of Earth, so any mechanical aviator will have to push a lot more to achieve an elevation – hence the Ingenuity test. As engineers took on this challenge at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2014, Iceland’s Bárðarbunga volcanic system erupted. Between August 2014 and February 2015, it spilled enough lava to easily suffocate Manhattan, making it Iceland’s largest eruption in 230 years.
The lava flow, by cooking ice and water trapped underneath, developed a hydrothermal system with hot springs that have become the home of many happy microbes. By 2021, things had cooled down, but remnants of these strongholds of life still exist, creating an environment similar to what researchers hope they can identify on Mars. To the tune of $ 3.1 million, NASA agreed with Hamilton that this would be a great place to test the next generation of automated Mars explorers, and RAVEN was born.
RAVEN has two components. The first is the rover. Courtesy of the Canadian Space Agency, it is comparable to Curiosity in terms of capability and design. It can be remotely controlled by a human (on Mars there would be several minutes of delay between commands and action), but it is also able to navigate the terrain on its own.
The real innovation of the project will be in its cargo. The drone is a carbon fiber hexacopter, capable of flying for around 35 minutes and up to a distance of three miles, carrying around 20 pounds of scientific equipment. He will act as the rover’s most technologically capable field assistant.
A camera will be a key instrument, but for more than just aerial photographs. It can take several different photographs of the same surface and then send them to the rover, where more powerful processors will create true 3D maps of the terrain – “a complete virtual rendering of the environment around the drone and the rover,” says Hamilton. These, in turn, will help him navigate the area accurately and quickly.
The drone will also use a visible near-infrared spectrometer, which looks at radiation from the ground to identify minerals or substances of interest. But the drone has another killer app.
NASA is laser-focused on returning pristine rocks from Mars to Earth. Perseverance will unearth and cache 43 pen-sized rock samples which, through a series of upcoming NASA and European Space Agency missions, will be brought to Earth by 2031. While this robotic Rube Goldberg machine will play out, RAVEN will test a new way to take samples in Iceland.
“My favorite part of RAVEN is the brand,” says Hamilton. This refers to a scoop, or a series of scoop models, which will be attached to the drone. The rocks of interest will be picked up and brought back to the rover, where the rover’s chemical interrogation technology will see if the rock is fascinating enough to go and visit the site it came from, either to see the original context or to get a larger sample. .
Scientists are also looking to use the same concept for their ground drones. “The most exciting part was seeing the label attached to it, because that’s exactly where I would like to go next year, for the [U.S. Geological Survey] at least, ”says Diefenbach, for applications here. “It made me very excited.”
The team’s engineering partner, Honeybee Robotics, also offers borehole designs to extract small cylindrical cores or grind rock into powder that can be sucked up and transported to the rover.
This year, RAVEN’s hardware is being manufactured and the software is encoded while its hardware is being manufactured. The games will begin in the summer of 2022, when the rover and drones arrive at the Holuhraun lava field of the Bárðarbunga volcano.
The first actual test of the equipment reads like instructions for a final practical exam. An operational team unfamiliar with the site, which will include students, will use satellite imagery to determine where best to “land” the rover and drones. They will give commands to the two vehicles and, within a set period of time measured in March-days, characterize the geology of the environment and identify pockets that are potentially habitable or formerly habitable. In addition to testing RAVEN’s technology, the test will determine whether a team newly arrived at the site will be able to identify the most astrobiologically areas to study – much like a future rover-drone mission to Mars will have to. “I cannot participate in the scientific planning of our team because I have the key to the answer,” says Hamilton, because he already knows the site and the areas with the best exploration potential. Once the trial is complete and the team will compare the scores, they will relaunch it in the summer of 2023.
Hamilton can imagine the moment when RAVEN, or something like that, is deployed to Mars for real. At this point, he says, “it’s possible the rover is an astronaut.” Imagine this, not science fiction, but reality: space scientists, drones flying over Martian volcanoes, searching for alien biosignatures in the hazy light of the distant sun, Earth (and fields of lava from Iceland) a bluish point in the sky.
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