NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Inspires New Deployable Quadcopter With Coaxial Design From Chinese Boffins

Chinese researchers were designing an improved version of NASA's Ingenuity for its planned mission to Mars. They opted for a coaxial design because they believed it would be better.

MarsBird-VII Quadcopter For Mars

Chinese boffins suggest a more competent extraterrestrial flier for a future Mars sample return mission, modeled after NASA's Ingenuity Mars chopper.

In contrast to the coaxial architecture of Ingenuity, a recent study from researchers at China's Harbin Institute of Technology suggests employing a quadcopter for Martian operations. According to the team, the MarsBird-VII helicopter will have four rotors that will enable it to transport up to 100g of Martian rock to a nearby lander.

Earlier this year, Chinese officials proposed collecting samples using an unmanned aircraft of some kind. The team points out that MarsBird-VII is still only a concept and hasn't even been tested adequately in a Martian environment simulation.

NASA's deputy assistant administrator for science, Sandra Connelly, stated last month that the agency is delaying the Mars sample return mission because of undetermined funding.

The Mars sample return slowdown is "short-sighted and misguided," and congressional representatives from California have reportedly complained to NASA about it, claiming it will affect employment in the state. China, meanwhile, has the same objective of bringing back samples from the Red Planet, and it seems that the Asian country is making progress.

"China is rapidly expanding its space program with ... a stated intention of being the first to return samples from Mars," a letter sent by a bipartisan group to NASA reportedly said. "This short-sighted and misguided decision by NASA will cost hundreds of jobs and a decade of lost science."

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What Is MarsBird-VII Quadcopter?

MarsBird-VII is a Mars quadcopter used in a sample return mission to gather and deliver Martian rock samples to a lander. It's a concept from the Chinese researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology.

It's a precisely designed quadcopter meant to function in the harsh Martian atmosphere. MarsBird-VII would have four rotors instead of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter's coaxial rotors, improving its capacity to retrieve geological samples weighing up to 100 grams for examination. The unique quadcopter would be responsible for carefully collecting clean regolith and transporting it to a stationary lander.

"The Mars quadcopter should be able to collect a rock sample with a mass of 100g and a diameter of about 40mm within a radius of 500m around the lander at once," the researchers wrote in the study.

The lander, which China has proposed to be stationary, would need the quadcopter to pick up Martian regolith that hadn't been contaminated by the lander's rockets.

The samples would be collected and returned to the lander by a robot arm fixed to the quadcopter. Then, using its claw, this would lift them into an ascending spacecraft and launch it back into orbit, eventually landing back on Earth.

The MarsBird-VII challenges the US and Russia's long-standing dominance in space exploration and represents China's goal and resolve to be a major competitor in the field.