Bugs on Mars: unearthly aircraft may explore the Red Planet—and beyond - flying robots for space exploration

Science News, May 25, 2002 by Peter Weiss

Anthony Colozza hopes to unleash flying robots on Mars. That may sound like the brainchild of a crazed, sci-fi film director, but the proposed bird-size robots are actually a technology designed for serving planetary science. Aerospace engineer Colozza and his colleagues are convinced that the machines, which will fly as insects do, may be the perfect explorers for the Red Planet.

Compared with rovers hobbling over all kinds of terra incognita, unmanned flying machines could peruse much more of a planet and do it faster, say Colozza and other proponents of flying robots. And unlike planetary orbiters that scan a lot of terrain at low resolution, autonomous aircraft would enjoy a closer view and might even be able to drop down at selected spots to examine an area in detail or to take and analyze samples.

Aeronautical engineers have been designing aircraft for missions to Mars since the 1970s. Some researchers are investigating the use of giant balloons, but most proposals are for fixed-wing fliers, like conventional airplanes. However, because there are no runways for landings and take offs on Mars' rubble-strewn, canyon-streaked surface, the first launch of a fixed-wing plane into the Martian atmosphere would also most likely be the aircraft's last.

Given those limitations, a handful of researchers, including Colozza of the Ohio Aerospace Institute (OAI) in Cleveland, have begun looking into robotic aircraft that could land and take off vertically in the extremely thin Martian atmosphere. With the right power source and an efficient design, such craft could carry out prolonged surveillance missions as well as detailed investigations of selected locations on the planet.

The insectlike machines being pursued by OAI and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta would carry out those tasks by vigorously flapping their wings--a means of flight long used by birds and insects but never mastered by human aviators. With that approach, Colozza and his colleagues are making a leap into the unknown. Although flapping as a means of flight propulsion is still in its infancy for aircraft on Earth, Mars' "strange combination of low air density and low gravity make that place perfect for flying large bugs," Colozza says.

Other researchers are pursuing more conservative designs that resemble helicopters. However, under the Red Planet's exotic flight conditions, even those more ordinary vehicles may have to assume unfamiliar forms. In one design, for instance, the rotors of the proposed Mars whirlybirds resemble the vanes of windmills.

OUT OF THIN AIR Despite his current passion for flapping wings, Colozza started out working on Mars flight as a fixed-wing guy. He was part of a now-defunct NASA project that would have celebrated in 2003 the centennial of human flight on Earth by launching a small, fixed-wing airplane into the Martian skies.

The idea of using flapping-wing vehicles came later to him and his colleagues, almost as an afterthought, given what they knew already about aerodynamics and the Martian atmosphere. The alien air is so thin--roughly equivalent to Earth's atmosphere at 30,000 meters--that a fixed-wing plane would have to fly faster than 400 kilometers per hour (km/h) to avoid crashing. Below that speed, it wouldn't be able to generate enough lift to stay airborne. For comparison, 400 km/h is about the top speed of a single engine, four-passenger plane traveling in Earth's skies.

To carry sufficient scientific gear, the Martian aircraft have to be bigger than flies or bees. However, if an aircraft's wings flapped in the manner of those of insects, Colozza and his colleagues realized, the flier's increased size and the decreased Martian air density could balance each other out.

"The size of a vehicle and the viscosity and density of the fluid [the air] are the main factors" in whether the vehicle can fly, Colozza notes. "You can play with those and, as long as the equation gives you the same final number, [the aircraft] should be the same aerodynamically."

Colozza had read in Scientific American that Georgia Tech was developing a 50-gram, flapping-wing flier for use on Earth. It has a wingspan of 15 centimeters. The Atlanta team's research, funded by the university and military agencies, was part of a broader effort in academia and industry to develop palm-size fliers called micro air vehicles (MAVs).

Unobtrusive and potentially cheap, those miniature craft are expected to be able to slip into buildings or caves and take pictures and sensor readings. Once inside such places, MAVs might also unleash weapons on holed-up enemies or help find missing persons.

Recently, findings on the aerodynamics of insect flight have convinced researchers that flapping-wing MAVs may offer an advantage over rotary or fixed-wing versions. Insects "don't fly like birds or planes--they use completely different principles of aerodynamics," Colozza says.

An insect's wing motions create vortices of air along the wings' edges that produce exceptionally strong forces for upward and sideways propulsion (SN: 6/19/99, p. 390).