Could we replace Ingenuity with a swarm of robotic bees?

People lastly achieved managed flight on one other planet for the primary time only a few years in the past. Ingenuity, the helicopter NASA despatched to Mars, carried out that troublesome job admirably. It’s now taking a well-deserved relaxation till some intrepid human explorer sometime comes by to select it up and hopefully put it in a museum someplace.

However what if, as an alternative of a quadcopter, NASA used a collection of flexible-wing robots akin to bees to discover the Martian terrain? That was the concept behind the Marsbee proposal by Chang-Kwon Kang and his colleagues on the College of Alabama at Huntsville. The undertaking was supported by a NASA Institute for Superior Ideas (NIAC) grant again in 2018—let’s have a look at what they did with it.

The idea was initially impressed by work on the College of Tokyo on a dragonfly-like micro aerial car (MAV). It is among the few drones capable of fly in Earth’s gravity utilizing versatile wings that flap. However wouldn’t it be helpful on Mars?

Mars has each benefits and drawbacks in comparison with Earth when contemplating whether or not versatile wing flight is feasible. Within the benefit column, it has about 38% of the gravity of our residence planet, so much less power is important for an plane to raise off. Nevertheless, there’s solely about 1% of the environment on Mars in comparison with Earth, so a flexible-wing plane would have considerably much less environment to push off to create that power.

In the end, a part of the Section I project for the Marsbee grant was to find out whether or not the strategy was possible. However why achieve this within the first place? Ingenuity, recognized on the time because the Mars 2020 Helicopter, was already on the trail to conducting the primary powered flight on one other planet. Whereas it was profitable at its acknowledged mission, it had a number of downsides, together with a comparatively massive dimension, which is at a premium on interplanetary journeys, and a flight time restricted to solely about three minutes.

Neither of these limitations was a show-stopper, clearly, however a flexible-wing plane that’s smaller and lighter might remedy each of these issues. Engineers might doubtlessly even retailer a number of craft in the identical space as what Ingenuity wanted in its ride-along with Perseverance. However would they work?

The quick reply seems to be “not with out further technical improvement.” Modeling of the design confirmed weaknesses in just a few areas that have to be addressed earlier than launching any profitable Marsbee mission. The largest hurdle seemed to be how versatile buildings, like those who would make up the system’s wings, interacted with the unsure aerodynamic setting of the crimson planet.

Different challenges embrace the load of the battery pack and the event of a steering and management system that would take care of the randomly windy Martian environment whereas remaining small and lightweight sufficient to suit on a versatile wing flyer. Additionally, it might be difficult to direct the flyers with no GPS, which does not but exist on Mars.

For now, efforts to develop Marsbees appear to have been placed on maintain, at the least for the final a number of years. With the success of Ingenuity, many questions on the feasibility of flight on the crimson planet have already been answered. However with just a little extra technical improvement and derisking, it is likely to be potential that sometime we’ll see flights of robotic bees buzzing across the crimson planet.