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by jvanderbot 877 days ago
Surfacing a comment: Here's a paper that describes what the next gen could/should be. The lead author is the head of Mars heli, IIRC.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9843501

In short, future designs target ~30kg heli, 5kg payloads. Other designs by collaborators are closer to 20kg. It's probably possible to transport a few of these on the existing lander technology, which would be awesome.

The scholar.google.com keywords you want are "Mars Science Helicopter" and a good touchpoint author is T. Tzanetos or S. Withrow-Maser
2 comments
two_in_one 877 days ago
> Other designs by collaborators are closer to 20kg. It's probably possible to transport a few of these on the existing lander technology, which would be awesome.

Actually it could be like 50 of them. Plus some ground robots to put together solar farm. And wooh... we get the first extra terrestrial permanent base

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jvanderbot 877 days ago
Well size is the limiting factor for fliers, since they like to have broad surfaces with low weight. But I think you're referring to some, ahem,

untested possible landing vehicles ...

in which case, yeah, you have a lot of robots.

For the solar farm assembly case, It's actually a lot easier to have a teleoperated robot doing the work, a few astronauts in orbit doing the operation / construction. In the case of building things, you want as much space / weight landed to be the thing being built, not the builders, per se.

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Keysh 876 days ago
Non-paywalled article about the concept, including renderings of the hexacopter design:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-next-mars-helicopter

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