UST034

50 Like most UAV missions on Earth, the onboard computer will contain the pre-planned flight paths, with Ingenuity autonomously managing its own heading, speed and attitude to follow those paths on Mars. The helicopter is planned to operate at a maximum airspeed of 36 kph or so, with a maximum vertical lifting speed of 10.8 kph. Its operating altitude will be limited to 10 m, and its range to 300 m, although it has a 1 km data link for transmitting telemetry to the rover once it has landed. Europa and Enceladus These oceanic moons of Jupiter and Saturn have long been of enormous scientific interest, as they could hold and support extraterrestrial life in the water beneath their ice crusts. Exploring their oceans requires a combination of drilling technology to penetrate the moons’ ice caps and advanced unmanned systems capable of long-endurance autonomous navigation, without the need to surface for localisation. Both technologies are being designed and engineered for this purpose by Stone Aerospace. Autonomous underwater navigation is a defining capability of its Sunfish AUV, the development of which is overseen principally by its AUV development subsidiary, Sunfish. The Sunfish’s dimensions are 161 x 47 x 20 cm, and it has a dry weight of 50 kg. It is battery-powered, with electric motors oriented in all three axes around its hull to give it six degrees of freedom. That enables self-adjustments in attitude, hover and heading, regardless of any restrictions imposed by geological or hydrological phenomena. Building the Sunfish for extraterrestrial ocean missions is made easier by the fact that the anticipated gravity and buoyancy conditions off-world are not so far removed from those on Earth. For example, Europa’s seabed lies roughly 100 km below its ice, and gravity in these conditions will be roughly one-sixth of Earth’s normal gravity. That is the same as in the Challenger Deep, the lowest point in Earth’s seabed, which has been successfully traversed by manned and unmanned vehicles. Guidance and navigation is performed through 3D SLAM, with sensors oriented in multiple directions around the AUV to measure and triangulate its surroundings from different angles as it travels through a map of its location, which it constructs in real time. The Sunfish has considerable computational power to perform the real-time SLAM calculations. The company has tested and matured its SLAM capabilities in a large number of hydrothermal vents, below ice shelves and in other GNSS-deprived underwater environments, without the AUV becoming snagged or lost. The vehicle has been deployed in a considerable number of terrestrial caves, lakes and vents, where its onboard sensors and embedded heuristics have discovered numerous new phyla of bacteria, highlighting its potential for gathering critical data from the hydrothermal vents suspected to exist on October/November 2020 | Unmanned Systems Technology The Perseverance rover (above) will explore, study, and sample the Martian terrain, while the Ingenuity helicopter UAV will scout for terrain and interesting features to help plan the rover’s activities (Courtesy of NASA JPL and CalTech)