Washington – NASA engineers are working meticulously to develop the flying robotic vehicles. These drones can travel up to regions which are inaccessible for rovers to collect samples.
The machines are being designed under the name “Extreme Access Flyers.”
These vehicles are similar to quadcopters which would utilize lander as a platform to replenish propellants and batteries between flights.
Extreme Access Flyers is seen as a prospecting robot that can help the explorers find out where the resources are hidden on Mars.
The process of finding these resources becomes extremely difficult in the places that have a permanent shadow.
In order to eradicate this limitation, NASA engineers are developing the new robotic vehicles that can fly over the shaded regions of a crate.
It will collect samples of soil to know whether it contains water-ice as per readings from orbiting spacecraft.
The new models can also navigate and climb through steep crater walls to collect samples. The drones will run on propellants developed from resources in the remote worlds.
The machines would be smaller in size to allow the lander to bring some of them to the surface at once. It also implies that if one of the machines fail, the mission is not thwarted.
The flyer is also expected to have a specially programmed feature to recognize landmarks and terrain and move to the areas controllers on earth.
This feature will help it to discover on its own the best region to collect samples from.
For samplings, the designers are planning for a modular approach that would enable the flyer carry one tool at a time to collect almost seven grammes of samples at a time.
Thus, the scientists on Earth will have a complete geological picture of the covered region.
Cold-gas jets utilizing steam water vapour or oxygen will take on the manoeuvring and lifting activities completed by the rotors on Earth.
