At Death Valley National Park and in the nearby Mojave Desert, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California flew three research drones over feature-poor dunes to evaluate navigation software called Extended Robust Aerial Autonomy. Similar low-texture terrain on Mars caused problems for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter's navigation system during several of its final flights, including its 72nd and last sortie.
Ingenuity was designed to estimate its motion by tracking visual features on the ground and performed best over well-textured surfaces. "Ingenuity was designed to fly over well-textured terrain, estimating its motion by looking at visual features on the ground. But eventually it had to cross over blander areas where this became hard," said Roland Brockers, a JPL researcher and drone pilot.
"We want future vehicles to be more versatile and not have to worry about flying over challenging areas like these sand dunes," Brockers added, outlining the performance goals for the new software. The updated navigation approach is intended to help future Mars rotorcraft maintain reliable tracking and landing capability even when the surface below offers few visual cues.
Death Valley has served as a Mars analogue site since the 1970s, when NASA prepared for Viking landings among volcanic rocks and barren slopes at a location now called Mars Hill. Decades later, the park hosted tests of the Perseverance rover's precision landing system, including helicopter flights that evaluated a key component over the same rugged terrain.
For the recent drone campaign, JPL engineers operated at Mars Hill and the Mesquite Flats Sand Dunes in late April and early September under a rare research license, the third such authorization for drone flights in Death Valley. Team members monitored the aircraft from beneath a pop-up canopy as temperatures climbed to about 113 degrees Fahrenheit, tracking performance on laptops while the drones flew over the dunes.
The tests examined how different camera filters influence the drones' ability to track the ground and how new algorithms select safe landing spots in cluttered areas like Mars Hill's rocky slopes. "It's incredibly exciting to see scientists using Death Valley as a proving ground for space exploration," said Death Valley National Park Superintendent Mike Reynolds, noting the park's role as a research laboratory in addition to its scenic and recreational uses.
During the same three-day trip, the team also flew at the Mojave Desert's Dumont Dunes, where NASA previously tested the Curiosity rover's mobility system in 2012. The rippled sand at Dumont provided a different style of feature-poor terrain, allowing engineers to compare how the navigation software handled variations in dune patterns.
Geologist Nathan Williams of JPL, who helped operate Ingenuity on Mars, said field work offers a broader perspective than computer simulations and limited orbital imagery alone. "Scientifically interesting features aren't always located in the most benign places, so we want to be prepared to explore even more challenging terrains than Ingenuity did," he said.
In a separate campaign, researchers from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston took a quadruped robot called LASSIE-M to White Sands National Park in New Mexico. The name stands for Legged Autonomous Surface Science In Analogue Environments for Mars, reflecting its role as a testbed for legged mobility and autonomous science decisions on varied terrain.
Motors in LASSIE-M's legs measure how the surface responds to each step, generating data on properties such as firmness, looseness, or the presence of crusts. Combined with other sensor inputs, this information allows the robot to adjust its gait when it encounters softer or more unstable material, changes that may indicate geologically interesting conditions.
The White Sands trials are intended to produce a robot capable of traversing rocky slopes and loose sand that could pose hazards for wheeled rovers while scouting ahead of human and robotic explorers. As it moves, LASSIE-M would use onboard instruments to seek out locations with promising signatures for further study.
Another Mars Exploration Program effort focuses on a winged aerial vehicle called the Mars Electric Reusable Flyer, or MERF, under development at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia. MERF trades the compact rotorcraft form of Ingenuity for a single flying wing with twin propellers that enable vertical takeoff, hovering, and efficient high-speed cruise for long-range mapping.
Because mass is critical in Mars' thin atmosphere, the MERF design omits a separate fuselage and tail to reduce weight. At full scale, the vehicle would unfold to a length comparable to a small school bus, carrying instruments on its underside to image and map the surface while flying at speed.
Langley engineers have been flying a half-scale MERF prototype over a test field on the center's campus to evaluate aerodynamics and structural behavior of lightweight materials. These tests help determine how the configuration will perform in Martian conditions and guide refinements to the design.
Together, the desert drones, legged robot, and winged flyer represent a wider suite of 25 technologies that NASA's Mars Exploration Program supported over the past year. Other projects address power systems, drilling and sampling hardware, and advanced autonomous software to make future Mars missions more adaptable and to assist astronauts when human exploration begins.
Related Links
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Mars News and Information at MarsDaily.com
Lunar Dreams and more
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