[meteorite-list] Dropship Offers Safe Landings for Mars Rovers

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Dropship_offers_safe_landings_for_Mars_rovers

Dropship Offers Safe Landings for Mars Rovers
European Space Agency
3 July 2014

The dramatic conclusion to ESA's latest StarTiger project: a "dropship" 
quadcopter steers itself to lower a rover gently onto a safe patch of 
the rocky martian surface.

StarTiger's Dropter project was tasked with developing and demonstrating 
a European precision-landing capability for Mars and other targets.

The Skycrane that lowered NASA's Curiosity rover onto Mars showed the 
potential of this approach, precisely delivering rovers to their science 
targets while avoiding rock fields, slopes and other hazards.

"StarTiger is a fresh approach to space engineering," explains Peter de 
Maagt, overseeing the project. "Take a highly qualified, well-motivated 
team, gather them at a single well-equipped site, then give them a fixed 
time to solve a challenging technical problem."

This latest team was hosted at Airbus Defence & Space's facility in Bremen, 
Germany, joined by engineers from the German Research Center for Artificial 
Intelligence, Portgual's Spin.Works aeronautics company, and Poland's 
Poznan University of Technology Institute of Control and Information Engineering.

Starting from scratch for the eight-month project, the Dropter team was 
challenged to produce vision-based navigation and hazard detection and 
avoidance for the dropship.

It has to identify a safe landing site and height before winching down 
its passenger rover on a set of cables.

Flying to a maximum height of 17 m, the dropship comes gently down to 
10 m above the ground, where it begins lowering the rover on a 5 m-long 
bridle, coming lower until the rover touches down. Then it returns to 
a safe altitude.

Flight testing took place at Airbus' Trauen site in northern Germany, 
which back in the 1940s was the scene of spaceplane pioneer Eugen Sanger's 
rocket experiments.

A 40 m by 40 m Mars-scape was created, littered with hazardous rocks, 
where the dropship had to pick a safe spot to deliver its passenger.

The dropship was customised for the project from commercial quadcopter 
components, with a smaller drone used for preparatory indoor testing.

Using GPS and inertial systems to fly into position, it then switched 
to vision-based navigation supplemented by a laser range-finder and barometer 
to land its rover autonomously.

This demonstration having proved the concept, the dropship approach is 
now available for follow-on development by planetary missions to come.

About StarTiger

StarTiger stands for "Space Technology Advancements by Resourceful, Targeted 
and Innovative Groups of Experts and Researchers" working within the Agency's 
TRP Basic Technology Research Programme.

It brings team members together on a single site to work on a set challenge, 
aiming to produce a working prototype by the end of the project's time 
limit.