AeroVironment to Co-design MARS Sample Recovery Helicopters

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) awarded AeroVironment, Inc. $10 million to co-design and co-develop conceptual designs and engineering development units of Mars Sample Recovery Helicopter flight systems.

Future efforts could include detailed design, build, and test of qualification and flight hardware. The helicopters build upon the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter design heritage and feature upgraded robotics to supplement aerial mobility.

AeroVironment engineers from the MacCready Works team previously worked with NASA JPL to co-design and develop the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which has completed 52 successful flights to date on Mars and survived 781 sols on the surface, far outperforming its design objectives.

The two planned Sample Recovery Helicopters would be a secondary method of sample retrieval for the NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return Campaign. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has already been collecting a diverse set of scientifically selected samples for potential safe return to Earth, is currently planned as the primary method of delivering samples to the Sample Retrieval Lander.

The Sample Recovery Helicopters would expand on Ingenuity's design, adding wheels and gripping capabilities, to provide a secondary method to pick up cached sample tubes left on the surface by Perseverance and transport them to the Sample Retrieval Lander. Once the sample cache is launched off the red planet, another spacecraft would capture it in Mars orbit, and then bring it back to Earth safely and securely in the early to mid-2030s. After the samples are on Earth, scientists around the world would examine them using sophisticated instruments too large and complex to send to Mars. The samples would remain available for future generations to study with increasingly advanced technologies. Scientists believe the samples could shed light on whether life has ever existed on Mars.

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages the project for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance during Ingenuity’s development. AeroVironment, Inc. co-developed, co-designed, and built the airframe and major subsystems.