Dropship offers safe landings for Mars rovers

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Dropship offers safe landings for Mars rovers

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.

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[Waspie_Dwarf]

Dropship offers safe landings for Mars rovers

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.

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. Flight testing took place at Airbus Defence and Space’s Trauen test site in northern Germany.

Credit: ESA/DFKI/Spin.Works/Poznañ University of Technology, IAII/Airbus Defence & Space

Source: ESA - Space in Videos

[CuriousRey]

That quadcopter is pretty rad, hope it sees some use in future rover projects as it looks to be quite handy and precise.