The Future Of Mars Robotic Exploration

Ingenuity The Ingenuity Mars helicopter after its final landing, which snapped its four rotor blades. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS) The future of robotic Mars exploration by Jeff Foust Monday, December 16, 2024 In January, the Ingenuity Mars helicopter lifted off for the 72nd time, a simple “pop up” flight for the tiny vehicle to get its bearings after making a rough emergency landing on its previous flight. But on the flight, the vehicle’s navigation system, which uses images from a downward-facing camera to lock onto rocks and other surface features to determine where it is and how it is moving, struggled in the featureless sandy terrain in that portion of Jezero Crater. At a briefing at last week’s annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, JPL engineers discussed what they believe happened on the final flight of Ingenuity. Immediately after the flight, they thought that the helicopter came in at an angle, with one of its rotor blades hitting the surface and breaking off, based on the images that Ingenuity was able to send back. “This program is looking at changing the paradigm of how we think about Mars missions,” said Ianson. “Every opportunity there is when a launch window opens up, can we send something up?” Instead, the force of a hard landing with high lateral velocities broke all four rotors at the same location, about one-third of the way from the tip. “It suggests that they were all subjected to similar loads and they broke at a weak structural point along the blade,” said Håvard Grip, chief pilot for the first half of Ingenuity’s mission at JPL, at the briefing. That conclusion, he added, was supported by structural analysis of the lightweight blades. The investigation led to several recommendations, such as improving navigation systems to handle terrain with few features and more robust handling of telemetry in the event on anomalies for any future helicopters. But when might another fly on Mars? The same day as the JPL team discussed the results of the Ingenuity investigation, NASA outlined its vision of the future of robotic exploration of Mars. The agency released a 154-page report titled “Expanding the Horizons of Mars Science” that describes what future robotic missions on Mars might do, and how. “This program is looking at changing the paradigm of how we think about Mars missions,” said Eric Ianson, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, during a side meeting at the AGU conference to discuss the report. “Every opportunity there is when a launch window opens up, can we send something up?” Rather than a few large missions, costing in some cases more than a billion dollars, the plan envisions more, smaller missions focused on specific science questions. Many of those missions will cost between $100 million and $300 million, carrying potentially a single instrument or a small suite of instruments. They would be augmented by a few “medium-class” missions with bigger price tags, potentially over $1 billion, along with missions of opportunity to fly an instrument on another space agency’s mission. And what would those missions do? The report outlined three “co-equal” science themes. One, called “exploring the potential for Martian life,” would focus on the search for past or present life on Mars. “Did life ever arise on Mars, and if so, does it exist today?” said Becky McCauley Rench, program scientist in NASA’s planetary science division and co-lead of the study, at the meeting. “If life never developed, why not?” A second, related one, called “revealing Mars as a dynamic planetary system,” would conduct other science about Mars, with a focus on comparative planetology, contrasting Mars with Earth and other worlds in the solar system. “We want to learn as much about Mars as we know about Earth,” she said. While the strategy is focused on robotic exploration, a third theme seeks to prepare for future human missions by doing preparatory science and filling knowledge gaps. The idea, she said, is to determine what those future crews can best do while on Mars to advance broader science goals. “How can we prepare to maximize that precious human time on the surface and the resources in connection with the export community here on Earth?” she said. The plan is a not a specific architecture of missions—fly missions A, B, and C in 2026, mission D and E in 2028, etc.—but rather an overall approach. Many of the missions, particularly the smaller ones, will be competed, with teams submitting proposals to fund their mission concepts that address science questions in those three themes. Ianson noted that might result, in some cases, NASA picking a single $300 million mission for a particular launch window or three $100 million missions. As NASA was working on the plan, the agency was looking at what roles commercial providers could play in robotic Mars missions. In May, the agency awarded 12 small study contracts to nine companies to explore how commercial capabilities could deliver payloads to Mars as well as provide communications and imagery. Those capabilities could refresh aging infrastructure, like the high-resolution camera on the nearly 20-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. At a meeting in November of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), NASA officials provided summaries of the studies. SpaceX, which had a study contract for communications services, proposed, perhaps unsurprisingly, a version of its Starlink constellation dubbed “Marslink.” Blue Origin examined how its Blue Ring transfer vehicle could be used to deliver large payload to Mars and also provide communications services. Albedo, a startup developing high-resolution Earth imaging satellites, explored using that technology at Mars. Agency officials said at MEPAG that while they were still reviewing the results of the industry studies, they appeared promising, an assessment that Ianson echoed at last week’s meeting. “There really is some merit here and we think there is something that merited further studies and further work,” he said. He added that the companies that participated in the studies were interested in playing a role in Mars exploration. “The biggest question or the biggest comment that we generally get from the commercial sector is, what’s the business case?” he said. He indicated that a purely commercial services approach, where the companies develop the capabilities and NASA then buys services from them, “is probably not a totally workable solution,” a finding that aligns with commercial services for crew and cargo transportation to the space station and commercial lunar missions. “There probably needs to be some level of investment through a public-private partnership on the NASA side up front,” he concluded. MSR update The Mars plan announced last week does not cover human exploration of Mars, which is the subject of the agency’s separate Moon to Mars strategy, beyond discussion of precursor science to support those later missions. The plan also does not include the ongoing Mars Sample Return program, which has been the subject of ongoing efforts to reduce its cost and shorten its schedule (see “NASA looks for an MSR lifeline”, The Space Review, April 29, 2024). Those efforts included soliciting a dozen studies from industry and within NASA on ways to alter the entire MSR architecture or key portions of it, like the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) rocket that would launch the samples collected by the Perseverance rover into Martian orbit to be picked up and returned to Earth. “They’re free to evaluate the benefits represented in the whole span of the studies and put together the architecture they think gives us the best chance of returning samples to Earth before 2040 and/or putting together an architecture that will cost less than $11 billion,” Gramling said of the MSR review team. Those studies are now complete and in the hands of NASA. The organizations involved have released varying degrees of details. At the ASCEND conference in Las Vegas in late July, for example, Northrop Grumman described its work to make the MAV smaller, which could in turn make the lander that delivers the MAV to the Martian surface smaller and cheaper. Quantum Space explored how its technologies could be used for the “anchor leg” of returning samples form cislunar space to the Earth, simplifying the Earth Return Orbiter spacecraft. At the MEPAG meeting last month, JPL showed how it could make the Sample Retrieval Lander, which carries the MAV, small enough to use the same “sky crane” technology for landing Perseverance and Curiosity, an approach that could cut the overall cost of MSR in half from earlier estimates of as much as $11 billion and get the samples back in 2035 versus 2040. The Applied Physics Lab and L3Harris discussed at the same meeting separate approaches for making the MAV smaller. Other companies have been less forthcoming. SpaceX was one of the companies that performed an MSR study but has provided little information about how it would do it other than a proposal abstract that stated it would leverage Starship. The studies are now in the hands of an independent committee called the MSR Strategy Review Team, or MSR-SR, chaired by MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber. (When NASA announced the MSR-SR in October, it was originally led by former administrator Jim Bridenstine, but he stepped down shortly after it started work; NASA said he concluded he was “unable to fully dedicate the time necessary to complete this important work for the agency.”) The team will review the studies and make recommendations to NASA on the best way forward. “That go-forward architecture doesn’t necessarily have to be any of the studies as proposed,” said Jeff Gramling, MSR program director, at the MEPAG meeting. “They’re free to evaluate the benefits represented in the whole span of the studies and put together the architecture they think gives us the best chance of returning samples to Earth before 2040 and/or putting together an architecture that will cost less than $11 billion.” That recommendation will go to NASA leadership this month, a schedule that agency officials have subsequently said they are maintaining. While NASA may decide on a new architecture for MSR in the final weeks of the current administration, it’s widely expected that the incoming administration will review and possibly reconsider that plan after it takes office in January. “We’re very happy that we have a range of options that are being looked at,” Gramling said. “We think we’re going to be able to come forward with a plan.” Mars Chopper The Mars Chopper helicopter would use the experience from Ingenuity for a larger, more capable vehicle. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Next steps With the broader robotic Mars exploration strategy in place, NASA is thinking about how to implement the plan. That strategy emphasized the need for technology development in several areas, from mobility to entry, descent, and landing. NASA’s 2025 budget request included $40 million to support technology development in those areas. While that budget request has yet to result in a final appropriations bill, NASA is taking action on that plan. Ianson said the agency has decided to allocate $30 million of that to 25 technology development projects at NASA centers, with the other $10 million being considered for grants to industry and academia for what he called “innovative robotic mobility technologies.” Mars Chopper “is a concept, intended to put out there a possibility for something that could be—and, obviously, we hope, would be—implementable in the future,” Grip said. He cautioned at last week’s meeting that the plan, which offered few specifics on funding levels, was unlikely to be adopted fully by NASA. The document itself stated that it depends on other priorities within the agency and its planetary science division. “Realistically, this Plan would not be fully realized until after MSR has returned samples to Earth,” it stated, but added that “the agile nature of the architecture provides the flexibility to implement portions of the Plan significantly sooner if funding were available.” “Obviously, we would love to do everything in the plan. However, that’s not realistic under challenging budget circumstances and competing priorities,” Ianson said. “I look at this plan less as a roadmap but more as a menu of options to choose from, based on the availability of budget and the most pressing needs to support Mars science.” Many, though, are prepared to offer missions if and when NASA does proceed with specific portions of the strategy. At the Ingenuity briefing, for example, the JPL team discussed their development of a new helicopter concept called Mars Chopper. The helicopter, with six sets of rotors, would be able to carry up to five kilograms of scientific payload—Ingenuity itself weighed less than two kilograms—and travel three kilometers per Martian day. “It’s really a gamechanger when it comes to exploration and discovery,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity project manager. They added there were no firm plans to develop or fly Mars Chopper, although a vehicle like it could fit into the new Mars exploration plan. “It is a concept, intended to put out there a possibility for something that could be—and, obviously, we hope, would be—implementable in the future,” Grip said. “We believe that although Ingenuity was the first aircraft on another planet,” said Travis Brown, chief engineer and team lead for Ingenuity, “it shouldn’t be the last.” Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.